Path of the Archmage
by jokeslayer94
Summary: I always loved stories. They were my means of escape from my boring, dull life. So, when I landed on Thedas with shiny new magical powers, it was a dream come true. The only problem is, now that the story and the real world switched places, it's not a freaking escape anymore! But it could be something better than that. A second chance
1. The End, in the Beginning, in the Closet

**Chapter 1****: The Beginning Inside the End, Inside the Closet**

* * *

"We have to leave NOW!" I yelled, as I grabbed my brother's hand and dragged him up behind me on the dragon's back. "Dragon-back is the only way we can reach the space station fast enough. We must stop Ganondorf from reaching the Metroid!"

The dragon turned its head around and winked at me, before flexing its wings and shooting into the air. As I grabbed hold of the reins, I remembered something… I haven't done my dream check in a while. Nodding to myself, I looked at my hand, and thought back on my day, just like the guides said… and froze. I looked at my hand, examining my fingerprints, the lines on my palm, and the old scar from trying to catch a falling pickle jar at my old supermarket job. At that moment I realized several things:

_1\. I had no idea where I was or how I got there. _

_2\. I was flying through the sky on a dragon, but I couldn't feel the wind in my face, or the cold of the upper atmosphere. _

_3\. I was FLYING through the SKY on a DRAGON!_

_Ok_, _There are 3 possibilities here: _

_Either I have been kidnapped and sedated with a hallucinogen, I have been kidnapped by an actual real life dragon who can use magic to keep a warm temperature and breathable air on his back,_

_or... _ I blinked and found myself in the basement of my childhood home, sitting on my favorite couch. Then I blinked again, and looked out over Lake Powell in Utah, as the sun rose over the horizon.

_Or the test actually worked._

"Holy Shit!" I gasped. "It actually worked! I'm actually lucid dreaming!" I couldn't believe that the stupid hand test thing had actually worked. Trying very hard not to freak out or stress, lest I wake myself up, I looked over the shore and saw a rock. I pictured in my head the rock flying through the air and landing in my hand. It happened. Grinning to myself, I pictured a realistic version of the 1st gen pokémon Magicarp, being similarly tossed out of the lake into my hand. It also happened. Numbly, I dropped both rock and fictional creature, and started laughing, maniacally. A deep red long coat draped itself around my shoulders as I threw up my hands dramatically, a ball of fire appearing in my left hand, and a ball of lightning in my right. Still cackling, I threw them both behind me and walked away as they exploded behind me, a sudden gust of wind blew through my hair and whipped up the hem of my longcoat behind me like a badass from an 80's movie.

Hey, don't look at me like that. What's the use of infinite, godlike power if you can't bring internet memes to life?

_One last thing to try. _

I jumped as high as I could. Then kept going. I flew up above the lake holding my hands out like superman as I sped off into the distance. Since I had no real grasp of geography, and everything here was a function of my mind, the ground below me was blurry and confusing. I caught momentary glimpses of all sorts of places from my memory as I tore across the metaphysical landscape, howling with joy.

On a whim, I decided to go back to my old dream. I remembered something about Ganondorf on a space station. Beating up a Zelda villain, this sounded like a lot of fun, given that I now had UNLIMITED POWER! I jerked, as suddenly the sky around me was replaced with the scene from Revenge of the Sith and I watched briefly as Emperor Palpatine lit up Mace Windu, channeling not one, but an entire supermarket's worth of large hams. I shook my head and put myself back on the dragon from the first dream. That was going to take some getting used to. We flew up for a short time, the sky darkening to the black of space as we ascended. In the distance, I could see the Purgatory, the for-profit prison space station from Mass Effect 2 where you find Jack.

Then something odd happened.

Up ahead of us, space tore open in a flash of neon green light with an accompanying boom of thunder. When the flash cleared, I saw what looked like a giant version of a fade rift from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Now, in the real world, that would be a big deal, but here in my dream, it shouldn't have been all that noteworthy, especially since it was familiar to me. There was just one problem.

**I hadn't done that.**

Granted, I was pretty new to lucid dreaming, but I was pretty sure this wasn't how it worked. I had even chosen the form of the space station in the distance, since I already knew its layout from the game and wouldn't need to waste dream time designing the interior portion of my little adventure. Unlike before I had "awakened", this dream was now little more than an amusement park ride I could direct with my brain. I knew everything that was supposed to happen. Except that rift wasn't part of my ride.

Feeling curious, I flew off the dragon's back and approached the anomaly. What was there to be afraid of? I was literally inside of my own head. Everything here was made of ME. Maybe the rift was supposed to be a portal to my subconscious, or my instincts or something. As I approached, I began to hear music emanating from the rift. Now thoroughly engaged, I approached the rift slowly. I noticed that the rest of the dream had faded away, leaving blackness. Frowning, I put myself in my childhood bedroom, the place I knew better than any other location on the planet. The rift was still there, in my closet. Interestingly enough, the rift wasn't the only irregularity in the room… On the far wall, between the windows, was a poster that had never been there. I looked at it and laughed in delight. It was the movie poster for 300, except instead of absurdly buff guys, there were a bunch of giant spiders wearing spartan helmets and wielding swords and shields of ancient Greek warriors . Fascinating. This wasn't just my room, it was my Mind Palace. I had put that poster on that wall in the palace in high school, to help me remember my locker combination, 8300, since spiders had 8 legs and the movie was named 300. But the poster didn't physically exist! _This is great,_ I thought to myself. _I can use this ability to create better and more complex mind palaces! _My mind raced and thought about all the ways I could use this to help me memorize different things, but as I stared at the imaginary poster, the music from the fade rift started to get louder. The sound was impossible to describe, and it wasn't just auditory. It sounded like the disappointment you feel after you finish a really great book, and you know that you'll have to wait till the next one comes out to find out what happens next. Like the sadness you feel when you reconnect with an old friend, only to discover the relationship isn't quite the same. Like the flicker of annoyance you feel when you put a lot of time and effort into a large jigsaw puzzle, only to find out that you could never finish it because some of the pieces were missing. It was… incompleteness. Entranced by the strange flood of emotions, I walked across the room and reached out to touch the edge of the green window of light. There was a bright flash of light, a sensation of falling…

and darkness.

I came back to consciousness slowly and begrudgingly. As I opened my eyes, I realized I still couldn't see anything, not even my backlit clock. In retrospect, that should have been my first warning. However, for the first 15 minutes or so after I wake up, I barely qualify as a sentient creature. Having decided that I could go back to sleep without consequence, I closed my eyes again. Drifting in my semi conscious state, I started to hear the music that I faintly remembered from my previous night's dream. It was sad, but beautiful, and, like most of my dreams, FAR more interesting to me than whatever the hell I had to do today. Attempting to recapture the dream, I became vaguely aware of vast clouds of different shades of glowing green, from the color of grass, to a green so dark it was almost black. In the distance, I could one of the clouds was so bright, it looked like a green sun.

Then my hand brushed through one of the clouds.

There was a flare of energy in my body, along with an odd, aching numbness in my right hand. Now fully awake, I sat up and went into my bathroom to splash some water on my face. Or tried to. The green cloudscape did not vanish. Unsure what was happening, I blinked my eyes several times, and waved my hand in front of my face. Still the green clouds did not vanish. I was not on my bed. I was floating through the air, seemingly without gravity. Also, though it was very slow and gradual, I could feel the energy leaving my body, making me groggy again. Something told me that if I allowed myself to fall back to sleep again, this time I wouldn't wake up.

It was at this point that I began to panic. I flailed my arms and legs around in an attempt to move, but it did nothing. I screamed for help at the top of my lungs. No sound came out. All I could hear was the music. It was a horrible, lonely sound, full of longing and grief. Something it needed was missing.

Then my hand drifted through another one of the clouds. I felt that same flare of energy, coupled with pain. It was as if I was drinking scalding water. But drink it I did. As I took in the energy, I felt it move through my body as if it were searching for something. I could feel the energy dissipating as it moved through my body, causing aching pain in its path. Then something clicked. The energy found whatever it was looking for, and something inside me absorbed it.

I gasped in happiness as something awoke inside of me that I had never known was there, something vast, and hungry. And it changed everything. Suddenly I was overcome with an overwhelming **NEED** for that energy in the cloud. I hurriedly stuck my hand into the nearest cloud, and instinctively began to absorb all the energy in it.

Instantly the energy roared through my system. It hurt more than anything else I had ever felt, and it kept getting worse. I understood that my body was grossly inefficient at taking in this energy I wanted so badly. I could feel the emptiness inside my soul growl in impatience. For all that I was taking in, I was absorbing very little of it. Howling in rage, I reached out for more of the energy.

The pain was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It felt like I had lava flowing through my veins, hollowing my body from the inside out. But still I continued to gorge myself. I couldn't get enough. As that empty place inside me slowly began to fill, I felt a song burst from my mouth, almost a mirror image of the other song, somehow. Both were crying out in longing and pain, but when they, for lack of a better term, heard each other, both songs picked up, flowing into and through one another to form a joyous anthem of triumph. I had a momentary vision in my mind of the 2 halves of a yin-yang snapping together and beginning to spin. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, and tears fell from my face, even as I screamed in more and more pain. I held on for dear life, clinging to the music like my life depended on it, as I felt my body begin to change itself to accommodate the river of power coursing through it. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the pain was gone. My body felt hollow and empty, as if everything inside my skin had been burned away. The sudden lack was so shocking, that I momentarily stopped taking in the energy. Everything was still for a moment, and for the first time since I woke up, it was also silent. I could no longer hear any music. Silence reigned. In that moment, I could see all the green clouds frozen around me in a spiral above me. It looked like I had been trying to inhale a tornado. The green sun was much closer now, for some reason.

Then, with a roar of triumph I raised my hand into the vortex and _pulled_.

Pure power washed through me like a tidal wave. My body no longer resisted the energy. I had adapted to it, and now I welcomed it inside myself like an honored guest. I felt like a million bucks. Like I could lift mountains, part seas, break armies. I was like a god.

**It was Good.**

The problem was that the vortex was still spinning. My new capacity for this energy was vast, but I was starting to hit my limit. I felt overstuffed with energy, and lightning began crackling around my skin as I tried to find an outlet for the power. Desperately, I cast around with all my senses for options. It was at that point that I realized that the bright green sun thing was not merely another energy cloud, as I had assumed, but some kind of window/portal thing. I propelled myself toward it using the power and shot through the gate. I emerged into what looked like a blast crater. Still crackling with the power, I took in the scene in front of me quickly, only processing enough info to register the fact that I was looking at a fight between a group of people and some kind of large black monster thing. I needed to dump some of this excess power fast, or my head was going to pop like a balloon. I had just decided to let it out into the sky, when a small voice in the back of my head told me that this scene was familiar somehow, and that I should unload on the monster thing. So, I threw my arm out in a line that wouldn't hit any of the other fighters and let loose. A torrent of raw power blasted out of me in a rush, crashing into the monster and enveloped and bypassed him, carving a ravine out of one of the crater walls. The blast went on for a good five seconds, and from the way in looked, I wish I'd had enough energy to yell "KAME-HAME-HAAA!" before I started, it would have been perfect. As the last of the energy dissipated, everything in the crater was still and silent. I looked over at the fighters, all of whom were staring at me in shock.

"Well…." I spoke calmly into the silence. "That was fucking awesome."

Then all the energy left me, and I collapsed into darkness.


	2. The Prodigal Son

**9:41 Dragon 3 months before the Conclave, Ostwick Circle of Magi**

Enchanter Alexander Trevelyan looked up from the text he had been reading at the sound of a knock on the door of his room.

"I'll be just a moment!" he called out.

Quickly, he rose from his reading chair and grabbed the ribbon bookmark his sister had given him on his 9th name day and placed it on the page. He did not approve of people who bent the pages to mark their location. Even such minor damage to books was contemptible to him.

Having done that, he walked over to his door, opening it to reveal his old mentor, Senior Enchanter Isabelle. She was a tall woman with a slender figure, but it was not only his opinion that she was curvy in all the right places. Nearly all of the younger mages had a crush on her, and Alexander was no exception. Of course, he hid this better than most. That was one of the reasons he had ended up as her protégé. He had never been the type to wear his emotions on his sleeve and despite his baser attraction to her, he still didn't think he was ready for any kind of relationship. Also, she was WAY out of his league. There was no way she could love someone like him. At least, that's what he told himself.

She smiled at him.

"Alex, my friend, may I come in?"

Alexander nodded at her, "Of course Senior Enchanter."

She huffed out a little breath.

"How many times do I have to tell you Alex, call me Isabelle." She fumed as she came in and sat in the reading chair. Alex settled himself on the small bed.

He replied the same way he always did when she asked him to use a name that would make him think of her as anything other than a teacher.

"At least one more time." He deadpanned.

She rolled her eyes at him.

"Aaaanyway, did you hear about the announcement of the Conclave?"

"No, I had not. What Conclave would this be?"

"The one Divine Justinia is calling in half a year's time, at the Temple of Sacred Ashes. She intends it to be a peace talk between the Circles and the Order." She replied, her eyes going serious.

"Well, then that explains why I haven't heard anything about this. You know how much I hate politics." He said to her with a scowl.

Isabelle's eyes softened in a way that told him she did not have good news to share.

"All the of the Circles of southern Thedas are sending representatives to speak for them, including Ostwick. First Enchanter Mathew would like you to be part of ours, in the hope that your family connections might help us deal with the chantry"

And there it was.

Alexander was the son and Heir of house Trevelyan, but he hated politics and had no skill for administration or intrigue. He had never wanted to inherit and would prefer to read and study. Acquiring knowledge and understanding the world around him had always been so much more interesting than the mess of lies, masks, and games that were required of his father. The day he had come into his magic and had to be removed from the succession had been the best day of his life. But even here in the circle, one could not escape politics or ignorance. Even if mages were some of the most well educated people in the world, surprisingly few of them really chose to make a study of the very thing that brought them to the circle, preferring to jockey for the attention of senior mages or powerful patrons. Of course, studying magic itself was difficult to do with the templars breathing down their necks about "Maleficarum". He had read enough fiction and history to read between the lines of praise for all the various "good deeds" done by the chantry throughout the ages. While he had nothing but respect for Revered Mother Andrea back home, he didn't think that much of the organization as a whole. Which isn't to say he didn't believe in the Maker just… religion was complicated.

They were all ignorant fools. He preferred his books.

He certainly did not enjoy the idea of leaving his precious library to trek halfway across Thedas to a mountain no one had ever heard of 5 years ago to be a fly on the wall in a room full of arguing zealots. And since this gathering was being organized by Justinia herself, then some of his more… devout… relatives would almost certainly be in attendance. They had not reacted at all pleased when the heir apparent developed magic.

In short, he hated everything about this.

Isabelle read all of this on his face, knowing him as she did.

"I know you would rather stay here and read Alexander, but even if we have remained mostly above the fray over the last few years, this rebellion business is getting worse and worse. People are dying. If we do not end this madness soon, it will swallow us all."

Alex knew she was right. He was sure that including _him _in the party would not have any effect on the outcome of the conclave, but he also knew there was no way to get out of this. Not if the First Enchanter had approved it. He sighed.

"Very well. At least I'll get to travel outside of the Free Marches."

* * *

Alexander was not finding the journey to be as enjoyable as he had hoped. The ship across the Amaranthine strait had been fun, but once they reached Highever, things started to shift. People looked at their group with fear and suspicion. As they crossed paths with a few other groups on their way to the conclave, some of the mages wore ever present expressions of fear and tension that were contagious. The few templars that they encountered looked at his group with barely constrained violence and a zealous rage in their eyes that frightened him. As they crossed through the Bannorn on their way to the Temple of Sacred Ashes it only got worse and worse. Back in Ostwick, with its neutrality, wealthy donors, inhabitants of noble blood, and templars with more reason than zeal, it had been easy to ignore the ugly stories he had heard about the so called "Mage-templar war". None of it had touched Alexander, and even if he did empathize with the rebel mages, he was too busy with his studies to care overmuch about affairs outside of the tower. Out here on the front lines, the conflict was much harder to ignore. In some towns, people even threw garbage at them, calling him and his colleagues "abominations", and wouldn't allow even the healers to come near them. Every night they put down the strongest wards he knew of around their camp site. Every dream he sensed the presence of more and more demons drawn to the nightmares of the human debris from this ongoing disaster. Sometimes, when the villagers stared at him in terror, he saw instead the faces of the templars amongst his relatives, judging him, hating him, calling him a disappointment to his family, and a disgrace to his father. In those moments, he remembered the vow he'd made when he passed his harrowing. The crystallization of his ideology: To use his knowledge and magic to help people and make the world a better place. But, as usual, he could not figure out a way to do it. His so called "family connections" weren't anything like as useful as the First Enchanter might believe, and he was just one mage among many. Still, he would do all he could to stop this madness.

The temple of Sacred ashes was just as magnificent as he had hoped it would be. This was quite fortunate for Alexander, given that the people **in **said temple were just as unreasonable as he had feared they would be. Especially his family. Not even 5 minutes into his first meeting with Uncle Timon in nearly 8 years, and the man had started making insulting remarks about the marriage prospects of his little sister Emily. So, Alexander punched him in the face.

Needless to say, that the Senior Enchanter immediately had him removed from the talks.

_Of ALL of the many sons my family has sent to the templars over the years, they sent UNCLE TIMON to a diplomatic summit? The man is so hostile even HIS OWN BLOOD don't associate with him anymore. I know cousin Maria is here with her grand cleric somewhere, but as much as the divine is trying to mediate, it's clear that neither side of this mess is going to back down and why the hell do I suddenly sound like my mother?_

He smirked at the thought, even if he had to admit to himself that his mother's skillset would be useful here. The woman excelled at all forms of verbal combat. She could manipulate people to stop fighting, she could annoy ANYONE into doing her bidding, and she had mastered the art of making you feel like druffalo shit without actually insulting you.

Alexander knew, now that he had calmed down, that Timon had been playing him. The wretch had deliberately baited him, hoping to trump up some kind of bullshit about mages not being able to be trusted to control their power. He got it too. Looking back on the event, he was glad he'd had enough self-control to merely punch the asshole in the face, rather than do anything magical. With all the stressed-out Mages and Templar zealots in the building who could sense magical assault, he could've started a fight big enough to wipe the Temple right off the face of T…

Suddenly his right hand exploded in white hot agony. His vision filled with nothing but clouds of green light, and then there was a feint sound that might have been the voice of a woman, a sensation of falling, then impact, then… nothing.

* * *

As Alexander drifted back into consciousness, he was aware of someone…shaking him?

He tried to back away, but something had bound his hands, so he lost his balance and fell over backwards. The pain in his head jerked him to full wakefulness. He was in…some kind of prison? What on earth was he doing in here? He didn't even know the temple of sacred ashes HAD a prison. It was a temple for the maker's sa… his train of thought was abruptly interrupted by an arm reaching out and roughly hauling him onto a stool in the center of the room. The owner of said arm was one of the most intimidating women Alexander had ever seen. She looked like someone had taken all the energy, experience, physical might and sheer menace of a full grown qunari berserker and stuffed it into body to small to contain it properly. She was fucking terrifying.

"Tell me why we shouldn't kill you now. The Conclave is destroyed. Everyone who attended is dead. Except for you." She said, her voice quaking with rage.

"W-w-what? No that's.. but … how … me?" He stammered. His mind had seemingly shut down. The entire temple destroyed? The divine dead, the templars dead, the mages dead? ISABELLE DEAD? It was too much to process.

The woman spoke again.

"Just how do you explain this!" she demanded, grabbing his right hand… which had a roiling, bright green nimbus of lightning in the center of it.

Desperate to stop thinking about what he had just learned, he seized on something else to pay attention to.

"Huh… That certainly wasn't there before." He said.

"What do you mean, it there before?" the woman scoffed.

Alexander, still examining the strange magic on his hand, replied "I mean I have no idea what this is, or how in Andraste's name it got stuck on my hand."

"You're lying!" the woman yelled and rushed forward to strike him. But before her blow landed, another woman appeared from out of the shadows, and grabbed her arm.

"We need him, Cassandra" she said in a voice a voice as delicate and cold as a snowflake.

The mysterious woman was also wearing armor, but unlike the other woman, she managed to look feminine while doing it. Still, she was also intimidating. He had only seen a glimpse of her blue gray eyes for a moment, but there was enough cunning and resolve in those icy depths to make a whole room full of his mother's courtier friends look like naïve peasants. She scared him even more than the other woman, Cassandra, did.

He looked at the mystery woman.

"What happens now?"

She stared at him coolly.

"That depends. Do you remember what happened?

he ran through the events of the last day he could remember.

"I was walking back to my quarters, having been dismissed from the talks after I punched my scumbag uncle in the face for threatening to marry off my sister. I was angry because I figured out that he had just been trying to bait me into doing something rash, so that he could point to me as evidence that mages were unstable. As I was walking, suddenly my vision went green. I remember being afraid, being in pain, then a woman… then falling."

Mystery woman remained aloof.

"A woman?" she questioned, raising an eyebrow at me.

"She reached out to me. She was saying something, but I can't remember what she looked like, or what she said."

Cassandra turned and spoke to mystery woman.

"Go to the forward camp Leliana. I will take him to the rift." Cassandra said, as she bent down and undid his shackles.

Alexander stood up and rubbed his wrists.

"Follow me. If you are truly innocent, then there is something I must show you."

She gestured for him to follow, and they made their way outside. The first thing he saw was that they were in the village of Haven, the small hamlet at the foot of the mountain the Temple of Sacred Ashes were built on. But there was an odd light in the sky over the buildings. Then he saw a small green fireball in the distance, and his eyes automatically traced the things path on their way back up to the Temple.

Where they promptly stopped.

The temple was gone. Completely. In its place was massive vortex of eldritch green light that towered into the sky, leading up into what looked like a hole in the very heavens. He was dimly aware that Cassandra was speaking, but he heard nothing. His mind _wanted_to be able to deny what he was seeing, but it could not. The temple was gone. Everyone in it was dead. Isabelle was dead. The sky had been torn open, he had no idea what was going on. His thoughts continued to swirl through his mind like a great storm, leaving him speechless.

Then someone stabbed a knife through his hand.

He keeled over, grasping his wrist, trying desperately to stop the blood, only to find that there wasn't any. It was that odd green light on his hand… which was glowing with the same vibrant green power as the hole in the sky.

"I said are you alright?!" Cassandra yelled at him.

He started, as he forcibly reasserted his attention on the world outside his head.

"I am sorry. That…is a lot to take in. I was…processing. Could you repeat yourself? I didn't hear a word you just said." Alexander told her.

Cassandra looked at him intently. "I suppose that is understandable, given the circumstances."

She gestured to the sky hole.

"We call it the Breach. It's a massive rift into the world of demons that grows larger with each passing hour. It's not the only such rift, just the largest. All were caused by the explosion at the conclave." She told him.

He stared at her. "An explosion can do that?" he asked incredulously.

"This one did. Unless we act, the breach may grow until it swallows the world." She said gravely.

Suddenly, there was another flare of pain in his hand. Alexander grunted, and had to lean against the wall, but he managed to remain standing.

Cassandra glanced at his glowing right hand.

"Each time the Breach expands, your mark spreads… and it is killing you. It may be the key to stopping this but there isn't much time." She told him.

Those words echoed in Alexanders thoughts, as something shifted in his mind. He knew he should be afraid, but somehow, where the terror and the grief and confusion had been a second ago, there was now an almost unnatural stillness and clarity to his thoughts. Alexander couldn't truly understand what it felt like to be tranquil, but he figured this was about as close as a feeling person could get. His emotions felt…distant somehow. He could still detect them in his mind, but they were numbed, like medicine on wound.

With this newfound clarity, Alexander considered what he had been told logically.

1: The Temple of Sacred Ashes had been destroyed in some kind of magical cataclysm that had torn a massive fade rift in the sky.

2: Everyone inside had been killed except for him.

3: Though he had no memory of it, he had somehow ended up PHYSICALLY IN THE FADE, which might have been how he survived the explosion.

4: There was an unknown magic permanently attached to his hand which was the same color as the breach.

The only logical conclusion was that the mark was somehow responsible for his survival and related to the explosion. That meant that Cassandra was probably correct. It was very likely that the mark could be the key to somehow fixing this mess.

Alexander was almost certain that were he not in shock, he would have run screaming in the other direction. But in this numbed state, he found that he could only think of one thing.

He had finally found a way to fulfill his vow he made all those years ago.

Shakely, he got to his feet, and looked to Cassandra.

"How can I help?"


	3. Taking Varric's Advice, aka Bullshitting

**Chapter 2: Taking Varric's Advice. AKA Making a Bunch of Shit Up.**

* * *

As I came back into consciousness, I heard multiple voices.

That isn't normal, what the hell are these people doing in my fucking apartment?!

I hunched up in the bed and raised my head to scold them.

"Who are you people and what are you doing in my…." I petered off. I was not in my apartment.

I was in what appeared to be a smallish wooden hut. The planks that made up the walls were rough but sturdy looking. From the light of the 2 torches on the walls, I could see another bed aside from my own, both done up with flower print sheets. But what drew my attention, were the people in the room.

My first thought was:

In front of my bed stood Leliana the Nightingale, left hand of the Divine. The game had almost nailed her, since she was so covered up by her leather armor and hood. She had always been attractive in the games, but there was only so much justice the screen could do for her, the woman in front of me, was a knockout. In more ways than just the face, if the way her armor clung tightly to her form was any indicator. Except, given her posture, and the cold, hard scrutiny and intelligence in her eyes, she looked less like a Nightingale and more like a Hawk…

I chuckled to myself.

Flanking her stood Commander Cullen Rutherford, broad of both shoulder and jawline, with his thick fur mantle, and his stubble and wavy blonde hair. With that 5 o'clock shadow and his straight-backed posture, he reminded me of my father.

On her other side stood…. A vision. Even in the game, Josephine had always been easy on the eyes, but the effect was somewhat hampered by the bad facial textures, some freckles, and the fact that her dress never moved. None of that was evident in the woman standing before me. She had flawless skin the color of bronze. Her dress actually accentuated her curves, as it hung off her form, which was more…. bountiful, in…ummm…places, then I remembered from the game. She was breathtaking.

The real shock, however, was the one behind them. He was of average build, at least, he was compared to Cullen. He had dark brown hair parted down the left side, and a strong jawline accentuated by yet another o'clock shadow. His eyes though, they practically burned with intelligence and perception. It seemed as though he could look into my very soul. Oh, and his right hand glowed bright neon green.

God, he looked so much better now that the hair didn't look like bits of plastic that had been glued to his skull. They all did.

I knew that face. I made that face.

My inquisitor…

"Alexander Travelyan" I breathed; my voice shaky. "This… This is the inquisition. How is this Inquisition?!" I asked no one in particular.

"How indeed?" Asked Leliana, staring at me with those piercing eyes of hers. "This is the inquisition because Divine Justinia willed it so, and because we have declared it to be so…. However, this has only been the inquisition for about an hour, and you have been unconscious for a day. How did you know that?" she pinned me with her eyes. "For that matter, how do you know the herald? You are obviously a mage, and you've the look of the nobility. Herald, do you perhaps know him from the Ostwick Circle?" She asked him.

"Not that I can remember, Sister Nightingale… and even if he were, what in the maker's name is he doing here?" He asked, in that deep, commanding voice that I always picked. That willowy, slightly accented other one from the game never fit my characters. He continued "I knew everyone from my circle who came to the conclave personally. He was not among them."

I remembered my dream, the fade rift, and that strange green cloudscape, and I began to suspect that I knew what had happened. But I couldn't just tell them that I was from another world where people played with their lives like literal toys! At a bare minimum, I was going to need to explain my knowledge of the plot, so I would need some kind of Oracle backstory. I'll wait until I have a better handle all of this to tell them any of the big stuff. In answer to my quandary, my mind conjured up a memory from the game. In my head, I heard the voice of Varric Tethras:

"You told them you don't remember how the creepy sky-hole magic got on your hand? They'll NEVER believe that! Should have spun a story…"

My mind raced through all the lore I knew, and fit the pieces into a basic hero's journey archetype.

"My full name is James Aaron Black, though I would rather you just call me James. In answer to your question, you are correct that I am not a member of the Ostwick Circle. In fact, I am not really much of a mage at all, or at least, I wasn't up until all this started. Though there have been a few mages in my family. I am not noble born, but my family are wealthy merchants."

Josephine piped in "Where is your family's trade based out of?"

"Antiva City."

Cullen cocked his head, "Well you're certainly far from home!"

"Yes I am."

Leliana stared pensively at me. "Yet you do not seem all that surprised to be here"

"No, I knew I would be here eventually. In fact, I was on my way here when, whatever happened, happened."

Leliana's stare evolved into an annoyed glare. "And why were you coming here, exactly?"

I thought for a moment, then had an idea. I started cackling gleefully inside my head. This was going to be fun!

I looked up at her calmly "Because in my visions of the future, I saw that my fate is inextricably bound up in this organization, and more specifically, him." I said, nodding to Alexander. Everyone in the room took a step back and fell silent. Except one.

"ME! I have never seen you I before in my life. Why would you be tied to me?" He said, his face pale.

I reached out to that empty place I remembered from the green cloudscape, this time finding it to be a vast lake of energy inside me. The power felt warm and right in my mental grasp. I looked inward, took a small portion of that power and thought really hard about the result I wanted. It worked. I felt some of the power flow to my eyes and my chest. I shivered slightly and spoke in a voice not my own, my voice echoing unnaturally in the air.

I released the power in my eyes and throat and pretended to stagger in my bed.

Inside I was howling with laughter.

To them, I look like the fucking Oracle of Delphi, but I just made shit that up on the fly!

I looked back at the others. Leliana was tense but composed. Josephine's face had gone completely blank, her eyes wide. Alexander was slack jawed in shock. Cullen…. Cullen's face had gone grey with fear, and his hands were shaking at his sides.

I glanced at Leliana, feigning curiosity and asked "Why are you all staring at me like that? Is something in my teeth?"

Cullen and Alexander were still processing, and Josephine was way out of her depth, so Leliana recovered first and asked, in a voice devoid of any emotion, "What. Was. THAT."

I cocked my head at her. "What was what?" I asked innocently.

Cullen jerked suddenly, and bull rushed me, slamming me into the wall of the cabin and knocking the wind out of me.

"WHAT DID YOU DO, ABOMINATION?!" He snarled.

"Can't…breathe!" I gasped.

Leliana put a hand on Cullen's shoulder. "While that did look suspicious, no demon I have ever heard of would ever willingly release its vessel once it had taken possession. Something else is happening here.

I frowned, "abomination? What just happened? I was telling you about my journey here and then I…. don't remember…" I trailed off, then my eyes went wide in surprise, then closed and my shoulders slumped. I let out a sigh.

"Let me guess. I shivered, and then I said a bunch of weird, vague sounding nonsense in a creepy voice?"

Alexander shook himself, then nodded at me. "You left out the part where your eyes glowed with eldritch light, but otherwise that's spot on."

I stared at him, "My eyes glowed? That never happened to granny."

"Granny?" Leliana said questioningly.

"My guardian, and mentor. Anna. She's a Rivaini seer I who discovered my minor talents as a mage when I was a boy. She insisted that I was destined to be a great seer, which I always thought was nonsense, since I was only Talented enough to have visions in my dreams, And true seers, who can do…what you just saw, must be powerful mages with a deep connection to the fade. Which I did not have. Until yesterday."

"Oooookay… Why don't you start at the beginning? This is all a bit confusing."

I sat up, discovering that I was wearing a heavy cloth robe…. And a loincloth."

I nodded at him. I stared at the torch on the wall and began to speak.

"Very well. I was born in Antiva city, the son of a merchant and a fereldan sailor, the eldest, of three. I grew up with means and education, though to the frustration of my father, my mother only hired ferelden servants, since they reminded her of her home. That, plus how bad I am at languages meant that I grew up speaking the common tongue, and only a smattering of Antivan. Even worse, I was never all that interested in taking the reins of our house. I was too busy reading anything I could get my hands on. As the other boys trained their bodies, I trained my mind. I became obsessed with magic, even though I couldn't use it."

I looked directly at the spymaster, "Much like a certain enthusiastic young mining caste dwarf girl you once knew, lady Nightingale. You might consider reaching out to her. She has become quite skilled."

Leliana stared at me with a totally blank expression. "Noted." was all she said.

I continued.

"What would it be like, I wondered, to be able to change the world around me using only my own will and the knowledge I had acquired, without even needing to depend on my weak body? I wanted it so badly, I would spend hours staring at a candle, trying to set it on fire." I smiled.

Alexander smirked. "How big was the explosion?"

Cullen jerked around to look at Alexander "Explosion? What explosion?"

I nodded to Alexander. "He means that when so much will and expectations are placed on a spell, it has more power. Even though I was only 9 years old, and very weak for a mage, I focused on that candle with more will and determination than some adult mages put into their battle spells. The candle exploded, and it set the desk on fire and blew hot wax everywhere. I didn't get any burns because the wax landed on my tunic, and a servant ran and fetched a vase of flowers to dump on the fire. My mother nearly fired that woman over those flowers. I told them I did it with my magic, but they didn't believe me. I didn't care. I was ecstatic. That night, I was visited by a spirit of happiness in my dreams. To this day, it remains one of the most precious experiences of my life."

Cullen stiffened.

"Oh relax. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Commander, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Not everything in the fade is a demon, whatever the chantry says. I knew that even before I met my mentor."

Cullen gritted his teeth at me but remained silent.

"Anyway, my parents didn't believe me when I told them the next morning, but then my future mentor visited the house and asked my mother if her child had a good dream last night. She nearly fainted."

"She took that as confirmation and explained that she had sensed the presence of a spirit of happiness nearby. This was extremely noteworthy, since spirits of happiness are among the rarest beings in all creation. Only the happiness of children is pure enough to sustain them, since children are not tainted by the trials, responsibilities, and experiences of the mature. She told my parents that it would be an honor to teach someone with a soul pure enough to attract such a spirit."

At this, Alexander stared at me in what I think might have been awe. Cullen smirked. Leliana and Josephine both lit up with joy. I might have imagined it, but I think Josephine teared up a little.

"I trained under her for 5 years. She attempted to teach me alchemy, but I had NO talent for it, so she eventually gave up. She also taught me what small magics I could master and taught me more about spirits and demons."

Cullen's eye twitched.

"Then, when I was 15, my parents started hiring and aiding ferelden refugees fleeing the blight. A few months later, my mentor came to the house and told me she had to show me something. She took me to her home and taught me about the path of the seer. She said that even though I was a weak mage, it was my destiny to be a legendary seer who could not just see the future, but also the past as well, and that one day, I would use my visions to reshape history."

"I did not believe her at the time. She was very…eccentric. Then she fed me some herb that suppressed strong emotion, it put me into a state very similar to Tranquility, except it only lasted for a few hours. Then she took me home and showed me the results of one of her visions: My house, burning to the ground with my family still inside, while an angry mob threw torches and called my parents "Dog Fuckers"."

This extracted gasps of anger and sadness from pretty much everyone in the room.

"I was safe from the grief, with the herb my master had fed me, and she took me home and explained to me that she had known my parents would die and didn't tell me. She explained that this was the burden of the Oracle. We see much, but some events cannot be changed, or else we disrupt the very flow of history itself. The consequences of that would be unspeakably horrific."

They all stared at me now with bleak, remote looks on their faces.

"I slept peacefully that night, but when I woke up the next day, the herb had worn off. I spent that whole day crying and screaming at Anna, telling her I hated her, or that she should have let me die with my parents, things like that. I went to sleep that night, and was met by a rage demon. I knew what it was. I was pretty sure I even knew what it was going to offer me. Even so, when it told me it could give me the power to hunt those who had killed my parents and burn

down in

homes I was tempted. I wanted to hurt them like they had hurt me. But then, I remembered something my father told me when I was a boy.

"With great power, comes great responsibility."

"I did not understand what he meant when I was young, but in that moment, armed with power, and being offered even more of it, I understood what he had been trying to tell me. I refused the demon, and banished it from my dream."

"Soon after that, the visions started. As Anna told me, I began to dream of the past. That is when I first "met" you, Lady Nightingale. My dreams that first year were mostly of the Hero of Ferelden, his journeys, his foes," I looked at her again. "His allies."

Over the intervening years, I grew in power, even as during the night, I grew in knowledge. I saw many things, including the rise of the Champion of Kirkwall. Eventually, I began to see the future in my dreams as well. Only bits and pieces of it, but still. I saw you, Alexander, and each of you, advisors. Many trials lie before you, but if you overcome them… well, I can't remember it, but I'm guessing the prophecy I gave you earlier explained it in suitable grandiose terms?"

They all nodded.

"I also saw glimpses of those who walk beside you on your path. The Seeker, The Storyteller, and a few others. Including, to my shock,

I paused. "I will need some help with that, I am afraid. I have never fought anyone outside my own dreams before, and I am something of a coward. It made me a popular target for bullies when I was young. That was why I stayed inside to read all the time."

Alexander nodded, "I haven't seen that many mages around camp so far, but there are a few. You will train with us."

I smiled at him. "You have my thanks. Please, make sure to invite the bald elf. Unlike the rest of you, I do not know his name. I only ever saw him on the periphery of my visions about the others, never directly. I asked Anna about that, she said the only people capable of hiding from the Sight were incredibly powerful mages who had a profound understanding of the fade, and a deep connection to the spirits who live there. I would very much like to meet him. What is his name?"

Leliana and Cullen both narrowed their eyes in suspicion, "His name is Solas. He told us that he was a simple elven apostate."

I scoffed. "He is far, FAR more than that, if he can manage to hide from the Sight. Not even your enemy could do as much!"

They all froze.

I threw my hands up, but before I could plea for understanding, the door slammed open with a loud

and Seeker Cassandra Penterghast, right hand of the Divine, and (begrudging) princess of Nevarra stormed through the door. Before anyone else could regain their composure, she stormed up to me, and whipped her sword out and put it to my throat, and demanded, "Who is responsible for this travesty?! Tell me who killed the Most Holy?"

Yet another pair of footsteps entered the room, and a deep, rough toned voice said with delicious sarcasm, "Oh wow, threatening a helpless person with violence unless he tells you what you want to know. I've never seen

before Seeker...OH WAIT."

I was torn between mortal terror, and internal fanboy screams over Varric. Out of all the characters faces, I had always thought that they had rendered Varric the best. Even his hair wasn't that bad. The dwarf before me proved me right. He looked pretty much identical to his in game self. And the chest hair? It was just as glorious as I had imagined.

The others looked at Cassandra, then Varric, then me, and then back to Cassandra.

Josephine snickered. Cullen facepalmed. Alexander actually burst out laughing. Leliana sighed loudly, and stepped forward and moved the sword away from my throat with her gloved hand. "Really, Cassandra? Varric I understand, but YOU?!"

She stuttered, her face visibly reddening, "I... I… he… AGH!" She huffed loudly and stomped off, standing next to Cullen.

I took a deep calming breath, faced Cassandra, and said,

"Tell me Seeker Pentaghast, honestly. If teenage apostate with no history or circle training, approached you or any other templar, mage, seeker, or even random person in the street, in the middle of the rebellion and told you,"

"Hey, I can see the future. The Divine's heavily secured peace talks, attended by some of the most powerful people in Thedas, is going to be blown up in a cataclysmic burst of magic no one has ever heard of before, which rips a hole in the sky that will literally RAIN demons down upon us."

Varric snorted. "He's definitely got you there Seeker!"

Cassandra scowled, but nodded.

I sighed. "That being said, I think I can tell you this much safely: Your enemy, the one responsible for the conclave explosion, is still alive. He calls himself "The Elder One"."

Leliana's eyes flashed. I had given the bird its prey. "It's something I suppose."

"Look, I really wish I could just tell you everything right now, but that would ruin everything! Even the small hints I CAN tell you in advance will slowly corrupt the timeline I foresaw, making my vision less and less accurate as time goes on."

"Now for all that is holy, can you please let me finish my story without any more interruptions or violence?!"

Varric chuckled.

"No Varric, I forbid you from using my story in one of your books. This one is mine. Get your own."

He whined back, "Come on Lightshow, it's a really good one!"

I tilted my head, "Lightshow? Hmmm…. I think I like that."

"It's certainly better than "Curly"". Cullen muttered under his breath.

I raised my voice slightly. "AS I WAS SAYING, I continued having dreams of the past, the present, and the future. During the days, Anna taught me what she knew of magic, spirits, and the Sight. She even taught me a few things about healing, though I could never work the spells. This went on until about 3 months ago. Then, out of nowhere, she...did what I did before... what she said was personal, but the general gist was that it was time for me to travel here, to haven, to rejoin the world and fulfil my destiny. When she came out of it, she told me she loved me like a son, and that I should check her strongbox."

"Then she fell over. Dead."

"I buried her body in her favorite meditation spot, I told her what I thought of her, and then went and found the strongbox. Inside was a request to a friend of Anna's that I be allowed to travel on her merchant ship from Antiva City to Denerim."

"The sea journey was rough, but we made good time. I learned how to help the sailors with some of the ship's chores and duties. When we reached Denerim, I used the last of Anna's gold to book passage with a merchant caravan going to Orzimar. We encountered bandits along the way, but the guards fought them off. Then, when we were about a week away from our destination, I went to sleep, and there was this flash of green light. All I remember after that was the color green, and unimaginable pain, all throughout my body. More than I have ever felt in my life. Then, when the pain stopped, it was replaced with a feeling of power. VAST power. I felt like some kind of god. Eventually I realized that I had so much power that containing inside my body was killing me. I don't remember much after that. I was desperately searching for some way of letting it out. The next thing I knew, I fell out of the breach. I was even conscious, but I remember a black shape that I thought might be something dangerous. So I unloaded the power on it. Then I passed out and woke up here."

"And that is the story of James Aaron Black."

No one said anything. The only sound was the torches crackling in the sconces on the walls.

Josephine broke the silence "Well, we have certainly taken up a great deal of your time, and to be frank, a great deal of hours as well. I need to get back to my office."

The others quickly agreed. The advisors and Cassandra headed back to the chantry. I got out of the bed, stretched, and said to Varri and Alexander "I don't know about you guys, but I haven't eaten anything since before the breach. My epic visions of the future do not include where to get something to eat in this town." I lied.

Varric laughed. "Well then com on Lightshow. Let's get a bite to eat."

"Wonderful!" I replied. "But no talk until after we eat. My throat hurts from all that talking."


	4. Scheming

**Chapter 3: Scheming**

* * *

The rest of the day passed me by in a blur. I ate mechanically, and managed to avoid talking too much during the meal, content to let Varric take the role of center of attention. As soon as I was able, I fled haven, and went to the cabin in the woods outside the village with a torch to light the fire in the hearth. Then I sat down in front of the hearth, and prepared to do some serious thinking.

I had somehow traveled to Thedas.

Granted, it had been A LOT more painful than most of the isekai stories I had read or seen in anime, but there were some similarities. I possessed MANY advantages over most citizens of this world that would allow me to influence future events. I knew the future of mighty and world shaking events. I could introduce modern knowledge and practices into this medieval setting to improve quality of life. If the magic of thedas was as imagination based as I thought it was, then I had the potential to be an IMMENSELY powerful mage. However, I suspected that this was where the similarities between my current situation and something like "In Another World with my Smartphone" ended.

There would be no harem of ridiculously attractive, easily impressed princesses falling in love with me at the drop of a hat. I mean, the Dragon Age series did not lack for hotties, but the mere thought of a thedosian harem was laughable. Most of these women would and could do things to me that would make death seem like sweet mercy, if I fooled around with them. Additionally, I did not have enough power to steamroll over all the challenges in my path with no difficulty like some kind of god, and even if I did, there was no way the elite of Thedas would react positively to a free agent running around with that much power.

That said, I had always dreamed that I would travel to another world and be a hero, like the characters in the books I read. In some ways, this place was a dream come true for me. I had never really felt… connected to my life. I never faced that much hardship, compared to most, and had many advantages due to my high IQ and my parents money. Ultimately, the fantasy worlds I created in my mind, or visited through books and videogames ended up feeling more real to me than the real world. The obsession with magic I mentioned in my fictional backstory had not been a lie.

I had only been on Thedas a day, and I already feel more connection to it then most of the places I had lived on earth. Here, I had a purpose to work towards, power to use to further my goals, and the chance to help people while also doing some really awesome shit. As an added bonus, people who can do awesome shit typically find it easier to get laid. Which, as a 25 year old virgin, was somewhat higher on my list of priorities than it probably should be. Given all those advantages, I sat in front of the flames, I considered how I could best bend the future of this world to my will.

My end goal, I decided, had to be to change the outcome of the game's storyline so that the orb is not lost. I could be imagining it, but I believe that if Solas had regained the orb, he would have been able to take the Veil apart a lot less violently than what he hinted at during Trespasser. And I definitely wanted the Veil to come down. Honestly, just knowing that it was artificial was enough to convince me. I already knew that sealing the fade had destroyed Arlathan, but I was betting that twisting the natural order of this planet had had far more subtle and potent negative effects. Imagine what would happen to the earth if the mood vanished. I have no clue what the long term consequences of that would be, I'm pretty sure they'd be really fucking bad.

However, even if I could help Solas take down the Veil peacefully, it would probably still result in hundreds of thousands of deaths, if the world was not properly prepared beforehand. I needed to completely overhaul the way magic was taught and understood. Far to many people on this planet believed that the only things in the fade were demons. Magic was feared in the south, and used as a tool of oppression in the north. Both attitudes lead to an overabundance of demons, which was bad. If I (and the inquisitor) could rehabilitate the image of the mages, and demonstrate to the world the importance of reason and understanding over ignorance and fear, it might be possible to shift the attitudes of the masses enough that the Veil could be removed safely.

To do ANY of that, I would need power, both political and magical. I already had some of both. Most of the international flavor of political power I needed could be sponged off of the Inquisition. The bigger problem was how to grow influence specifically over the magi. That would come from magical power. Which I now had, but had no idea how to use. I had a lot of ideas for stuff I could do with spirits in the fade, and a few more ideas I could do with basic magic. But in order to do any of that, I was going to need help, but given that I gave myself minor talent in my fictional backstory, I would need to teach myself the basics, if I wanted to not appear suspiciously ignorant when I asked Alexander or Solas to teach me. All of which, added up to one inevitable conclusion.

**It was time to make some magic happen!**

I decided to start with the basics. I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. I cleared my mind, and examined the pool of energy inside me (which I decided to call my "mana pool" for obvious reasons) that I used for magic. It was warm, welcoming, and seemingly alive in my chest. I remembered the sense of incompleteness radiating from the music in my dream on earth. There was no sense of that now. I felt whole, on a level I didn't even realize I had needed. It was a great feeling.

But that wasn't all there was. As I took stock of myself, I became aware of a… connection of some kind. It was like a new sense. If I had to describe it, I would say it felt like a periscope for my mind. I could use it to look at... I think it was the fade! I could sense emotions roiling through the aether, Rage, Pride, Despair,... as well as Hope, and Faith. Spirits. I was sensing all the spirits lingering here from the Conclave Explosion and the Breach. Lots of demons, obviously, but some good ones as well, probably because of the inquisition. I hurriedly stopped "looking" before one of the demons noticed me, and decided to get around to some practical application.

Remembering my earlier successes with my "vision" from earlier, I reached inside myself and imagined myself holding a ball of light in my hand. I felt the energy race through my core up through my hand, and suddenly I was holding the ball. I practiced dimming it, brightening it, and even changing it to different colors. The drain on my pool was there, but it was slight. I had A LOT of power. Next, I practiced moving the ball around the room. Unsurprisingly, though the drain was still small, the farther the ball got from me, the more mana I had to expend to keep the ball in existence. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me. In the game, mages supposedly used staves because it was easier to channel their mana through lyrium infused implements than it was to channel them through your own body. But I felt none of that. My mana flowed easily through my body. In fact…

I broke my concentration on the light ball, and focused back on my mana pool. Taking more power out, I dumped it into my body, imagining it circulating through my veins like blood. Instantly I felt stronger and faster. I sat back, blinking rapidly in surprise.

_Dirth'ena Enasalin! _

I had just stumbled onto the basis for the arcane warrior class! Unfortunately, I was going to be going for a total ranged caster build, but it would be a good ace in the hole for emergencies. A wave of fatigue swept over me as soon as I cut the mana.

_Yup! Definitely for emergencies. Just because I can give myself magic steroids doesn't make me a knight enchanter, let alone a master of the "Knowledge that Leads to Victory"!_

Next I tried to direct the power to my ears, nose, and eyes. That worked too! I could increase the accuracy of my senses. That was definitely going to come in handy!

There was one last thing I felt I had to master if I was going to go into combat. I needed a barrier. So I drew on my core again, and imagined a barrier around my person. That appeared too. It definitely took more mana than the ball of light needed, but it was still manageable. Also, the barrier was also my favorite shade of red.

_I guess it's kinda cool that my magic manifests as my favorite color, but it is quite possible that I might get some trouble with idiot templars accusing me of blood magic. Oh joy._

By now, I had been practicing for some time, and though I had not done anything too intense, I had done a lot. As my pool was gradually used up over the course of my practice, I started noticing a sensation of fatigue. Not of the body, but of the mind. It was very odd. It felt kind of like the single mindedness that I felt after physical exercise, when all of my focus narrowed down to "Water, food, rest." over and over again, but more severe, and lacking any kind of physical fatigue to accompany it. Naturally, this made the visualization aspect of the magic harder to perform. The funny thing is, it was kind of nice in a weird way.

When you are as introverted as I am, you tend to think a lot. Take memories of my life and the stories I've read, a couple of random philosophical tangents my brain will conjure out of random stimuli, one or two wild ass plans for stuff I want to do. Then liberally season everything else with a thick coating of self-esteem issues and self doubt. Take all of that, and throw it in a blender. Forever. And that is essentially what it feels like inside my head.

Sounds fun right? Hell, the only reason I was able to act this confidently at all was that some part of me still thought of this as a game, and because I knew everything that was going to happen. A tiny voice in the back of my head was telling me that soon, I was going to be disabused of that notion. I was pretty sure the voice was right, and that eventually I would be forced to confront the reality that I was never going to see my family again, and that in the future I would have to fight for my life and kill people.

But until that time, I was perfectly happy to repress all of that and hang on to the high I was currently riding called **HOLY FUCKING SHIT, I CAN FUCKING DO MAGIC THAT IS TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY OF MY LIFE!**

Having accomplished my goal of a baseline control over my magic, I snuffed the fire, and rose, stretching to relieve the stiffness in my body from sitting so long. I grabbed the alchemist's notes for Adan's sidequest and left the cabin, and walked back to Haven. I had spent so much time in the cabin that it As I walked through the streets, I noticed that with that handy "emotional periscope" thing I discovered, it was actually possible to make out flashes of other people's emotions. It wasn't like I was a full on empath or anything, but I got glimpses. If I was paying attention. Fascinating.

I made my way to the chantry, as I wanted to speak to Josephine. However, as I opened the door to her office, I found the bronze beauty talking to a bald man in a strange yellow robe, wearing a ridiculous mask on his face.

_Oh, this must be the Marquise Du whatever the hell his name was! _

"This is an inopportune time Marquise. More of the faithful flock here every day." Josephine was saying. She turned around as I walked in.

"Please allow me to introduce James Black, a scholar of magic who has lent his support to the effort to heal the breach." She continued smoothly.

_Damn she's good. "Scholar of magic" she calls me. I sound positively authoritative!_

"Ser Black, may I present the Marquise DuRellion, one of Divine Justinia's greatest supporters."

He butted in, "And the rightful owner of haven! House DuRellion lent Justinia the use of these lands for pilgrimage. This _Inquisition _is not a beneficiary of this arrangement."

_Oh this should be fun!_

I cocked my head and stared at him for an empty moment, then said in my most incredulous tone, "...You DO know that this inquisition was called by direct writ of the most holy, as executed by both the left AND right hands of the divine, Right?"

He huffed, "I've seen no records from Sister Leliana or Seeker Pentaghast that Justinia approved this venture."

Then Josephine went for the kill. "If you will not take the lady seeker at her word, Marquise, then I am afraid she will demand satisfaction from you in a duel."

The man's eyes went wide and he squeaked out, "What?"

"I'm afraid it is a matter of honor among the Nevarrans. Shall I arrange the bout for tonight?"

The marquise stammered, "N-No, I will respectfully rescind my complaint. The right hand may use this place with my blessing!" He practically fled from the room.

I waited a moment, and then chuckled as I sat down across from Josephine's desk.

"Impressive, my lady. You handled him effortlessly."

She smiled, "I will admit to having some skill in that area."

I smiled at her, "Indeed. That is partially why I am here. I am a blunt person, with little interest in the social graces. That was fine out in the woods with my mentor, and in truth, it matters little to me even now. In these desperate early days, the inquisition must prove its worth through our actions, rather than any words, skillfully spoken or not."

She started to protest, but I cut her off, "Please do not misunderstand me. I do not cast aspersions on your office, lady ambassador. As we both know, once the inquisition proves that mettle, your position will become increasingly important as our influence grows."

Her expression smoothed back out, though the smile did not return to her face. "You are of course, correct. But I believe you still underestimate my contributions. Consider the good Marquise. He is ultimately harmless, but he could have made things difficult for us without my intervention."

I sighed. "You are probably right. As I just said, I am not exactly a people person. Either way, when we have that influence, I will need your help to play the game as you and Leliana do. I will need that skill, if I am to accomplish my goal."

She eyed me skeptically "Your goal? What exactly would that be, and why should I help you, if it does not relate to the inquisition's singular purpose of closing the breach and bringing justice to the murderer of the Divine?"

"Because my goal is a related one. As the inquisition gains power, it will also gain influence. I wish to use some of that influence, as well as some of my own as the "Oracle of Andraste" as I will inevitably come to be known, to try to guide the future of the southern mages to a better system than the circles, in addition to resuscitating the public perception of the mages and magic in general."

She stared back at me. "Well, while that is indeed a worthy goal, it is somewhat ambitious, and as you say, premature. Why in the maker's name would you ask me now?"

I looked her in the eyes. "As I said. I would need your help to carry it off. I am not good at diplomacy, and I will need it to make any headway towards this goal. I also believe my intentions line up with your personal beliefs."

Her eyes narrowed. She said in a low voice "And what, exactly, do you think you know about my personal beliefs?"

I raised my hands up in surrender, "See this is what I mean about not being a people person. While I will admit, that my visions have shown me more about the Nightingale and the commander, due to their pasts with the hero of Ferelden, I know this much about you, Lady Josephine Montilyet. You are passionately devoted to the primacy of reason and discourse over violence and blood. That is an admirable trait to have in general, and a truly great boon to a diplomat. The world needs more people like you in it."

She blushed furiously… "Ser Black, why could you possibly need help from me when you've such a silver tongue in your mouth! You speak with such eloquence!"

Now it was my turn to blush, "Because you are a beautiful woman, and I have a large vocabulary. I have no doubt that I will be changed by this journey we are on together. We all will be. However the issue surrounding the mages is fraught with high tempers and old grudges, and mired in religious doctrine and ignorance. I will have to deal with elitist mages on one side of the debate and religious fanatics on the other! I cannot deal with such closed minds!"

She sighed, "That is certainly true. As you say, I do not have the connections to help you with this at the moment, but I will keep this in mind as we move forward. I cannot in good conscience put this ahead of any more pressing issues from my primary duties to the inquisition however.

"I would never ask that of you ambassador. What you have offered is more than enough. Thank you for humoring me." I said, rising from the chair.

I left the ambassadors office feeling satisfied that I had made a good accounting of myself.

_Made a good accounting of myself? God, I'm even starting to think in polite language. Maybe the Game won't be so bad after all?_

I chuckled to myself and began walking back to mine and the herald's cabin, with a gleeful grin on my face. Tonight would be my first visit to the fade.

It was time to make some more friends.


	5. The World of Pure Imagination

**Chapter 4: The World of Pure Imagination**

* * *

I lied down on my bed and tried to sleep but as usual, nothing happened. I have had trouble sleeping for my entire life, which was one of the reasons I had tried so hard to lucid dream back on Earth. But here in Thedas, I suspected I had a little something extra…

_God, I hope this works!_

I took a deep breath and focused inside myself on what I had identified earlier as my connection to the Fade. Slowly, I reached for it, and looked into the fade, focusing all of my awareness on it and dismissing the world around me completely. I started getting something akin to tunnel vision, then there was a flash of vertigo…

And I was standing back in my childhood room, where all this mess had started. I did some dream manipulation, changing my environment, my outfit all in order to determine if manipulating my dream here in the fade was any different than it had been on earth. It pretty much was. Even though this was the fade, this particular bubble was still MY dream, made of MY power and thoughts. Though unlike on earth, here the dreamspace was...limited? That's not really the right word. If I wanted it, this space could go on forever, but even so I sensed a boundary of some kind with my Sight. I guessed it was probably the limit of my dreamspace, outside of which was the raw fade.

Low and behold, just as I was piecing that together in my head, I felt a pulse of energy on the barrier. I was about to chance looking outside the barrier, when I realized that the energy I had felt contained a fragment of… intent? Emotion? Information? It was a mixture of all three, somehow. The gist of it was that the "pulse" was a message of greeting, and a request to enter. A metaphysical doorbell. From Solas.

_Shit! I was hoping to avoid him until tomorrow. I can't let him see my plans yet, they would reveal how much I know!_

_Buuut, the fade is his home turf. It would be really hard to hide from him when he's already here. Plus, I could really use his help to acclimate to this world and understand its rules better. The raw fade is a dangerous place._

I sighed, put myself back on the shore of lake Powell again and "opened the door", allowing the big bad wolf to enter my dream.

Fen'Harel nee Solas was of average height, and he was dressed in his casual clothes from the game, the shabby beige robes, but those were the only average things about him. His face was perfectly symmetrical, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut your hand, and his eyes were sharp and clear. He was not particularly broad shouldered, but nor was he the skinny beanpole type I had always seen him as in the game.

_Ok, maybe he is A LITTLE good looking. But he's certainly not the virtual Adonis that all those fangirls painted him as in their fanfictions. Cullen is much more handsome. But NOOOO Cullen doesn't have a tragic secret backstory, secret/ancient knowledge or a savior complex._

Another of the voices in my head piped in.

_**Oh come on. You know the whole "Creepy seeker of forgotten knowledge who hates stupid people" thing is sexy. That's why you liked Morrigan better than Leliana isn't it?**_

_Yeah! When I was a stupid teenager who didn't know any better!_

_**Are you seriously going to tell me that Morrigan isn't sexy?**_

_Are you telling me Leliana ISN'T?_

_**Of course not! Now that she's got the whole "Deadly assassin who knows all your secrets" vibe goin on, and dresses in more skintight leather outfits, she's gone from like a 6 to a straight up 10!**_

_There is more to relationships than psychological trauma and sexy outfits!_

_**Definitely! There's also what's **__**underneath **__**the sexy outfits. She's definitely bigger in some key places than she was in the game… and did you see Josephine? DAYUM!**_

_SHUT THE HELL UP!_

Some of my internal conflict must have shown on my face, because he cleared his throat meaningfully.

"I'm sorry, am I interrupting something?" he said, gesturing to the…

_Oh Jesus fucking christ._

There, on the beach, were Leliana and Morrigan both in their default costumes from DAO, wrestling with each other like they were in the WWE.

_Ok I am stopping this RIGHT NOW!_

_**WHY? I vote we see where this leads!**_

_YOU DON'T GET A VOTE ASSHOLE!_

I quickly erased the titillating scene from existence and turned to face my guest.

"Well, I think I'm going to pretend THAT never happened. Please don't tell the Nightingale. I like my penis **attached **to my body."

"Let me start over. Andaran atish'an. My name is James Black."

He smirked.

"As you say. My name is Solas. I would name myself a simple apostate, but it is my understanding that you dispute this claim?

"I do dispute that. I couldn't See you. No ordinary mage could hide from both mine and my mistress' divinations. I should have guessed that you would be a dreamer." I replied.

"It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, James. Before the Breach, I would have called the energy you unleashed on that demon the most powerful act of magic seen in an age of the world. Could you explain to me how you accomplished it?" He asked.

_How much to tell him? I don't want him to know my true origins right now, and I might trip myself up somehow and alert him, but I do want to establish myself as a powerful mage, and despite how imagination and willpower based the magic here seems to be, every magic system has rules. I need a teacher, and I couldn't do much better than the dread wolf._

So, I gave him an abbreviated version of my "life story" and slowed it down when I got to the actual details of the green cloud place.

By the time I got to the energy blast, he was captivated.

"Fascinating. You say you have never wielded this much power and connection to the fade before?" He asked.

"Yes. When I was a boy, I couldn't do much more than light a candle."

"Do you have any theories on what you think happened?" He inquired.

"I… I believe that at the moment the breach was torn open, I was asleep on the exact spot one of the rifts appeared. I think I was _physically asleep and dreaming, _while _in the fade._ I felt like I was dying. I was trying to…take in some kind of energy to preserve my life, but it was hard to get enough. It felt like…"

I conjured a small table with a small empty vase with a thin mouth. Then I conjured a gallon pitcher of water and dumped the water onto the table. It got everywhere, but I erased it from existence everywhere but the vase. It was not full. Only a little of the water had gotten in.

I gestured to the vase, "Like that."

He looked at me curiously. "You do realize that in this metaphor, the vase is your body?"

I shuddered. "Yes. It was the worst pain I have ever suffered in my life. It felt like I had acid flowing through my veins, destroying me from the inside out. However, if my suspicions are correct…"

I grabbed the lip of the vase, and slowly manipulated the dream to widen the mouth of the vase, while also simultaneously enlarging and deepening it.

His eyebrows shot up, "Have you performed any magic since this transformation? How did it feel" he asked?

"Good. I know my capacity to hold mana has increased dramatically. Spells that once took a significant amount of my power now barely phase me. It seems easier to cast now, then I remember, I just picture what I want to happen, and my magic creates it. I seem to have a much deeper connection to the fade than I did before, my mana seems to regenerate faster, and if I focus in a specific way, I get flashes of people's emotions, as well as a general sense for the other side of the veil in my immediate vicinity. I am also apparently now a dreamer. Which is awesome!"

He smiled at that last bit. "Your enthusiasm is commendable, however, the powers you describe, while impressive, could be very dangerous to both yourself and others if not guided properly. Your increased perception and access to the fade alone could grant you great power but could also make you a beacon in the fade for demons. Additionally, such purely will based spell casting as you describe usually requires more mana than a proper spell, and is also much harder to control, making more sophisticated magic all but impossible without using spells to control it."

He sighed. "In short, your potential as a mage is enormous, but at this early stage in your education, your abundance of power is actually more hindrance than strength and will continue to be so until you can properly control it. You will need a teacher, and the while the herald is no mere conjurer, he is both too young and far too busy to serve. I, however, would be happy to offer my guidance. Your unique experience fascinates me, as well as your other abilities. Most of the seers of Rivain are merely ordinary mages who are open minded enough to be receptive to the guidance of benevolent spirits. True oracles, the eolaselan'mah, are among the rarest mages in Thedas. More so even than dreamers."

I gave him a little bow, and said, "I would be honored to be your student, hahren."

He quirked an eyebrow at me, "You speak elven?"

I rubbed the back of my neck, "No, I'm awful at languages. I just know a few greetings, goodbye, and hahren. My mentor could speak more, but apparently even the dalish aren't completely fluent, since the language goes back to Arlathan."

He narrowed his eyes at me. "And what exactly, do you know about Arlathan?"

I met his gaze. "My mentor told me that Arlathan was the capital of Elvhenan, the empire of the elves, who were at the time, immortal beings of immense magical power and knowledge. I would have liked to see it; it sounded like an amazing place."

Solas looked away. "It was that." He said in a quiet, sad voice.

_Sooo, I've already secured a teacher, but if I am going to accomplish my plans, I really want access to a spirit of knowledge. The archivist from the Vir Dirthara would be ideal, but the library isn't actually in the fade. Maybe one of his fragments ended up here? I think I remember reading on the wiki that it was originally a spirit of wisdom?..._

_Of course!_

My eyes widened.

"Hahren, I"

He cut me off. "Respecting your elders is commendable, da'len, but flattery is useless. Unless we are in a lesson, I am simply Solas."

I nodded.

"Solas, one of the last things Anna told me was that I should "Seek wisdom". I think she knew I would gain this power. She said SEEK wisdom. She often spoke in riddles. I think… I think she meant that I should attempt to consult with a spirit of wisdom?!"

He replied in a dry tone. "Da'len, while consulting a spirit of wisdom is rarely ever a **bad** thing, they are powerful beings who rarely bother with the affairs of mortals. And they dwell in the deep fade, only accessible to the most experienced dreamers, unless they come to you. The raw fade is a dangerous place for the unwary. A bargain then. During the day, I will teach you magic, and during the night, you will explore the fade with me, and I will show you how to deal with its many hazards. If you learn well, and prove yourself worthy of it, I will take you to meet Wisdom. I do not offer this lightly. Wisdom is one of my closest friends, and if you are not in proper control of your power and emotions, you could corrupt her into a pride demon. If that should happen…" He stared at me, and suddenly he radiated menace like heat from a fire. "**I will end you**."

In that moment, I saw Fen'Harel, the renegade god. The man powerful enough to burn the world down. It was terrifying. And then the renegade immortal was gone, replaced by the polite bald guy in unassuming clothes.

_**That is so fucking cool.**_

_He just told us he was going to murder us. Also, I thought I told you to shut up!_

I stared at him briefly, expressionless. "Alright then! Let's get started!"

With that, I walked out of my door, and willed away my dreamscape, entering the pure fade.

It was the same as I remembered it from the game. While I had been getting used to the real-life equivalents of people and places that I had previously only known as pixels on a screen, the fade looked exactly like I imagined it would. Literally. I wouldn't say that reality looked pixelated, exactly, but where the waking world was sharp and clear, the fade was hazy, and slightly indistinct. Kind of like the graphics in an xbox 360 game. Go figure.

I closed my eyes and tried to focus my Sight, like I had been practicing all day. On this side of the veil, I could feel emotions swirling in the air around me like wind in my face. Gusts of icy fear buffeted me, accompanied by eddies of rage, and heavy humid breezes of despair. Mixed in with it all were warmer currents, similar in form, perhaps, but completely different in result. Gusts of hope uplifted me, faith on the edge of the current. Here and there were spots of...absence, I guess? The emotions were still present, but it was like they were trapped inside of some sort of bubble, which I guess represented people's dreams. Other disturbances were marked by a large concentration of one particular emotion, clearly those were spirits. These disturbances continually gave off some of the currents I was feeling.

It was glorious chaos.

I took it all in for a moment, blank faced.

Then I started yelling as loud as I could, whooping with joy and laughter.

"THIS IS THE SINGLE COOLEST THING I HAVE SEEN IN MY LIFE! FUCKIN AWESOME! MAGIC IS THE BEST!

As I gloried in this moment, my mind registered the fact that I seemed to have a dbz power aura around me. I was surrounded by a corona of blazing yellow fire, which was blasting waves of awe, joy, and amusement like heat from a stove, changing the emotional air currents throughout fade Haven. This sight only made me even happier. As the light coming off me intensified, I only cheered harder. Then, just when I thought I couldn't feel any better, what I can only assume was my subconscious added his two cents. The fade around me suddenly rang out with the thunderous anthem of awe that was John Powell's Flight theme from the first "How to Train Your Dragon" Movie.

The intensity of the emotion was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I had started this, but I no longer controlled it. I sat now in the eye of my own personal hurricane of happiness, shining like a star, **AND** **I REVELED IN IT!**


	6. Wolfwartz school of Witchcraft&Wizardry

**Chapter 5: ****Wolfwartz School of Witchcraft & Wizardry**

* * *

I opened my eyes blearily and tried to clear the cobwebs from my thoughts. I had hoped that with my shiny new dreamer powers I would be able to wake from sleep as easily as I could now enter the fade, but alas, it seems as though no planet in the multiverse could make ME a morning person. I got up and dressed in the borrowed mage armor they had given, which was basically just a shirt, pants, boots and heavy leather robes. The ridiculous flared collar from the games was nowhere in evidence.

After a quick breakfast and some water from the tavern, I got to work. First on the list was to deliver the Master Alchemist's notes from the cabin in the woods to apothecary Adan, who merely grunted in thanks. Then I introduced myself to the quartermaster and spent an hour hiking through the wilderness around Haven, using my memory of the game level to locate iron and lumber resources. During the whole time, I mostly kept silent, and practiced my Sight. It was both more, and less than I was hoping for. Though I could use my magic to increase the acuity of my vision, I could not give myself sniper scope eyes, nor could I give myself x-ray vision or any other kind of ocular power. I could see fade energy. However, the 'flashes of emotion' that I had noticed last night were actually part of a faint aura that I could detect around everyone I met, that I was guessing represented the limited connection to the fade of a non-mage. It was very hard to make out, most of the time. There was also a lot of random magic in the air around Haven, like an invisible mist. I didn't know if that was normal, or a result of the breach.

When I returned to the village, I walked over to Solas' tent, and found him speaking with Alexander. They both noticed my approach, and James called out to me.

"There you are James! Where were you all morning?"

"I was doing a favor for the quartermaster, helping her assistants locate resources from the hills outside the village." I replied.

"Why would you do that?" he asked me, a puzzled look on his face.

"Because I wanted to get a handle on my surroundings, try to help the inquisition in any way that I can, and to get my blood flowing after waking up. I am a VERY heavy sleeper." I replied.

"I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense. You said you were apprenticed to a Rivaini Seer for a few years, so I imagine you are no stranger to the wilderness." he said.

I thought back to my experiences as a boy scout and nodded to him. "I know enough to get by." I turned to Solas. "I was hoping to begin the lessons around now, if you had no objections. I thought I should begin by outlining my basic understanding of how my magic works. I was trained by a Rivaini seer, Alexander was Circle trained, and I do not know your background at all. There may be differences in our approach."

Solas paused at that.

"A little forward of you to dictate to your teacher, da'len, but your point is a valid one, and it shows wisdom to have even considered such a thing. Very well. Tell me about your magic." He said, as he walked with us through the town.

I gathered my thoughts and began.

"All magic comes from the fade, a realm of nearly limitless magical power where emotions and will shape reality instead of the forces of nature. Those without magic are connected to the fade in a limited way, but their connection is limited, and they can only enter the fade in dreams, and even then, only fleetingly, and without control. Mages are people born with a much firmer connection to the fade, allowing their bodies to store some of it in the form of mana. This mana can be shaped by the mage's will into spells. Mages also have greater awareness of and control over their dreams and can even enter the fade itself if they have a strong enough tie. I don't really have a good understanding of exactly how spells work. Before all of this, I had so little power I needed every drop of it to just get the job done."

Solas and Alexander both nodded.

"That is essentially correct, if lacking in detail. In some ways, it is good that you have used this way of casting, since one's willpower is absolutely essential to both the practice of magic, and as a defense against the temptations of demons. However, as I told you last night, there is a limit to the kinds of magic you can perform with raw will. More complex magic requires precision and focus. A spell is just a magical effect you have practiced so often that you can do it by reflex. Observe."

I focused my Sight on Solas as he brought his hand up. His aura, just as I had theorized, was much different from any of the others I had seen before. It was clearer and more visible than the slightly muted colors I had observed up to this point. It was also strangely static, which did not make any sense at all, given that it was a representation of his connection to the fade, a chaotic plane of emotions and thought. As I watched, his aura flared, and there was suddenly a ball of fire floating above his hand.

I narrowed my eyes at Solas, "Did…Did you just channel the energy through your aura?" I asked

He blinked. "Yes… I did. You can see my aura?"

At the same time Alexander asked, "What's an aura?"

Solas turned to James. "A person's aura is a sensory representation of one's connection to the fade. All thinking beings except dwarves have them, and naturally, the aura of a mage is significantly larger. Mages can technically use any of the 5 senses to detect auras, but sight is the most common and usually the most effective."

"Alright, that makes sense," Alexander said, "But how come we were never taught about these auras in the circle?"

"I'm not circle trained, so this could be completely wrong, but if I had to guess, I would say that the reason probably had something to do with demons or blood magic." I piped in. Alexander scowled at him.

Solas sighed. "I imagine you are correct in that assumption, James. You see, while it is impossible to forcibly manipulate people's minds without blood magic, directly observing someone's link to the fade makes it possible to sense people's emotions to a certain degree. The technique can be blocked with the right discipline, and even mastering the perception is itself incredibly difficult and rarely achieved, but …"

He didn't even need to finish. "Anything that even remotely resembles mind magic is forbidden on pain of death." Alexander said despondently.

"Precisely," Solas continued, "Furthermore, since the auras are fade energy, perceiving and understanding them requires a level of comfort with and understanding of the fade, which is hard for mages who have been taught to fear and guard against it their whole lives."

Alexander's shoulders slumped briefly, and he muttered under his breath in frustration.

By this time, we had arrived at a secluded glade in the forest north of the village. Solas nodded to me.

"Let us begin. You have some training, and you would have to be familiar with your connection if you have manifested the Sight. Show me what you can do."

Thinking back to my experimentations the previous day, I reached for my mana pool and imagined myself holding a fireball. My mana flowed out of me and into the world, until the fireball was in my hand. It took more mana to hold on to the spell then the light had, I noted. Then I thrust my hand out and imagined the ball flying from my hand to strike the tree. It did so, striking the trunk and flaring out, leaving the bark scorched but whole.

Solas nodded to himself.

"An admirable first attempt. It is as you have said, you are merely using your mana to enforce your will on the world. For beginners, this method is almost useless, because you are only focusing on the external appearance of what you are attempting, rather than the effect you want. The result is therefore more illusion than evocation. It is possible to evocate using this method, but it takes immense focus, experience, and knowledge of **exactly **what you are trying to accomplish, down to the smallest detail. There are advantages. If you are skilled enough to use this method, it can be a lot more adaptable then traditional spells in small applications. However, if you try to do something drastic, you may find you do not have enough mana to create the effect you want, which can have nasty consequences." He grimaced. "Instead of having your mana follow your will directly, you must separate your mind from your power. First, you shape the spell in your mind, then you power the spell, then you release it. For a basic fireball, concentrate on fire and forward motion, hold them together in your thoughts, and then push mana into the idea, then release it."

That actually made a lot of sense to me. I have read hundreds of fantasy books in my life. A good portion of them were about some kind of magic user (did I mention I love magic). Most of them had different ideas about how magic worked, but for a setting like this, where it entailed the manipulation of energy through will, most of them agreed that those were the basic steps of spellcasting. Have the spell in your head, power it, and throw it. Sometimes those first two were switched around, but it was always those three.

I closed my eyes and thought about fire. The heat of it on my hands at night, around the campfire with the boy scouts. How much fun I had throwing things into the fire and watching them burn. How satisfying it felt to start a fire on a cold winter morning. I tried to hold that steady in my mind, while simultaneously thinking about the movement portion of the spell. This was much less difficult. I thought about a line extending forward from my hand, of a bullet being fired from a gun. Focusing intently, I put the two ideas in a mental "box" in my head, and then willed power into the box.

The result was… hard to put into words. Imagine a balloon. It is a flexible container that expands the more air is forced into it by the person blowing it. Casting the spell was like the reverse of that. The "air" (my will) was already in the shape I wanted it, but I had to force the "balloon"(magic) over the "air". I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's the best I can do. The human mind and imagination are infinite precisely because they are intangible. Thoughts are no more solid than the amount of effort we put into focusing on them, and even then, outside stimuli can shatter them like glass without supreme discipline. The magic _made it tangible_.

The implications of **that **were so profound that I lost control of the spell. It felt like a combination of a static shock and a balloon popping inside my skull.

"AHH FUCK!" I cried out. "That REALLY fucking hurt!"

Solas remained unmoved. Alexander winced.

"You must be wary of spell miscasts in the future. They get worse the more mana you pour into the spell construct. Beyond a certain threshold of energy, they are fatal." Solas said.

"Noted." I sighed. "That wasn't me putting in more power than I could contain. I was just so shocked by the sensation of something in my head that wasn't MY thoughts."

Alexander nodded.

"It's really weird the first time. That's why you hear all those stories of new mages burning their houses down or accidentally killing someone or something else equally awful. They are so confused and scared that they lash out."

Solas nodded again. "Not just children. In this case, the alien substance is at least _his _own mana. When one is possessed by a spirit, the discomfort is far worse. The combination of the Mage's fear and confusion at the intruder in his mind, and the spirit's own confusion at the unfamiliar "environment" of the material world creates madness. The uncontrolled magic corrupts the mage and spirit both. This is how abominations are created."

Alexander went pale as a sheet.

"Maker's Mercy…" he breathed.

I could sympathize. That sounded beyond horrifying.

Solas grimaced. "Now that we've covered the worst-case scenarios, would you like to try again James?"

I nodded. I closed my eyes and re energized the spell. As I empowered the spell form, I noted that there was a connection between how much energy I put into the construct, and how much I needed to focus to prevent another miscast. With my eyes still closed, I made sure to maintain the construct and said

"Solas, I have the spell. How do I cast it?"

"The same way you do with the pure will-based cast. Just will it out into the world."

I pictured the spell shooting out of my hand. This time, the results were a little more impressive. A fireball the size of my fist shot out of my hand and flew into the tree like an arrow from a longbow. When it struck the tree there was a loud thudding noise, and the tree shook, dislodging the snow in its branches. When everything was once again still, there was a crater in the tree at the impact sight.

Solas raised an eyebrow at me.

"Impressive for a first attempt."

"Impressive? I've known senior enchanters who couldn't have thrown a ball with that much force!" Alexander said.

"Indeed," Solas nodded. "Now that we have covered the basics, we should figure out what your affinities are."

"My affinities?" I asked.

"I think you mean which of the 4 schools he is skilled with, right Solas?" Alexander said.

"It is a little more complicated than that, but yes." Said Solas

I tried to remember the wiki.

"Primal, Spirit, Creation, and Entropy, right?" I said questioningly.

"As I said, thinking of them as 'schools of magic' is somewhat inaccurate. All magic is about manipulating the fade, which is the realm of will and emotion. As much as some mages would like to remove emotion from the practice entirely, the truth is that emotions are so fundamental to our existence that they can never be completely banished except by tranquility. How we think and feel about whatever it is we are trying to accomplish can affect the result almost as much as how much power you put into it.

Therefore, each person has an emotional attachment to certain applications of magic. Each person's relationship with their abilities is different, but in general, there are 4 different correlations between emotion and magic type.

Creation: This school is the that healing, physical augmentation and most forms of nature magic are derived from. As you might guess, it is tied to positive emotions. This is why spirits of compassion aid spirit healers.

Entropy: This is the school of hexes, curses, and other forms of indirect destructive magic. However, entropy is not a concept most people are comfortable with, so finding mages with an affinity for this school is rare.

Primal: This school is the simplest to understand, since it is used to bend the world around us. It is also one of the most emotionally reactive schools. Every mage has an affinity for at least one of the sub-schools of primal magic

Spirit magic: This is the least understood school. It deals with the energy of mental forces, the fade, and other intangible energies. It is mysterious, but in the right hands, also very powerful." Solas finished.

Alexander let out an impressed whistled. "Wow Solas, I even learned some from that! How did you learn so much about magic without circle training?"

Solas smiled. "A combination of talent, intellect, instinct, knowledge I gained from observing memories in the fade, and consulting with spirits of wisdom, knowledge, creativity, and other entities."

"Fascinating!" Alexander beamed. "A creativity spirit helped me pass my Harrowing! I can only imagine the insights of knowledge or wisdom spirits!"

Solas glanced at Alexander and raised his eyebrow again. "While I would very much like to discuss that meeting with you at a later time, we have gone off track. James, please hold the spell in your mind. Try to use as little energy as possible."

Over the next few hours, Solas tested me in all of the elemental schools from the games, fire, lightning and ice, and spirit. I discovered to my delight (but not surprise) that I had a high affinity for both fire and lightning, but not ice. This did not seem to surprise Solas very much. I did try to manipulate the ice around us, but all that got me was a blinding headache. Using external elements was possible, he informed me, but very complicated and focus intensive.

As a dreamer, I had a naturally high affinity for spirit magic, apparently. I only did a bit of minor telekinesis. He said that the mind school of spirit magic was the least dangerous to play around with. Buffing people using spirit magic was actually a form of benign mind magic, which made it dangerous if not used correctly. Straight up fade spirit magic was complex enough to require its own lesson.

He did not have me attempt any creation or entropy magic. Creation did not lend itself to any simple or easy spells like lighting a candle or moving a stick with my brain, and entropy because using it without affinity could be hard on the caster. He did not elaborate on what that meant, but while I did want to try it anyway, I wanted to try it when I was fresh. So instead, we just practiced small scale evocation for the rest of the afternoon.

As we pelted the trees with tiny bolts of fire and lightning, Alexander started to open up about himself.

The highlight reel of his backstory was as I had expected. It followed the same basic lines as the one I had invented for my player character during my second playthrough of the game. Curious, intelligent, interested in history, an avid reader, and a hater of politics. He had been overjoyed when he came into his magic. While he chafed at the restrictions placed on the study of the arcane, he was more or less happy in the neutral and relatively safe Circle of Ostwick. Until now.

However, there were also a couple differences that I had never dreamed up for my character. For one thing, he didn't have autism like I did, which meant he was actually quite perceptive when it came to other people, even though he still hated politics. He explained his harrowing in more detail, elaborating on his interactions with the curiosity spirit. It had helped him learn to survive the fade, and in doing so, help him defeat the despair demon that was his final exam. By its actions, Curiosity had showed Alexander that not all spirits were evil, despite the templar propaganda. He had subsequently made the fade the subject of his studies as an enchanter. This had the unfortunate side effect of alienating him from the more religious amongst his fellows in the college of Aequitarians (the same college that Irving and Wynne had belonged to). He had been frustrated with the discovery that he could not even escape politics in the circle tower. Solas had chuckled at that.

For the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed hanging out with other people. Having to lie to them about my origins wasn't ideal, but both Solas and Alexander were intelligent, curious, and had just the right level of disregard for other people's opinions to appeal to me. That wasn't exactly surprising, seeing as one was my favorite character in the game and the other one was designed as a self-insert character of MYSELF, but it was still enjoyable.

Once again, I found myself grateful to have come to Thedas. Here I could make the difference I never could on earth. Here I had the confidence and power to interact with other people instead of hiding with headphones all the time. Best of all, **I COULD NOW SET SHIT ON FIRE WITH MY MIND!**

Life was good.


	7. The World Of Pure Imagination, Redux

**Chapter 6:**

**The World of Pure Imagination: Redux **

I stretched luxuriously as I sat up in bed. Only my second time transitioning into the fade and it already felt easy as breathing to me. I was becoming more and more aware of my constant connection to this place, as a part of my magical training. It was like an invisible, ethereal charging cord that was constantly plugged into my mind. When I entered the fade, I just followed that cord like the Theseus followed Ariadne's string.

Just for fun, I levitated myself out of bed and down the stairs to the front door. Opening it, I strode out onto the front lawn to see what New Jersey looked like in the Fade. Unsurprisingly, it looked mostly like it had when I was a boy. My family had lived in a small valley between three different hills of various different grades, and I could still see the surrounding houses to the left and ahead of me. The house to the right of ours was obscured by a tall row of hedges. Interestingly, while everything I remembered about my neighborhood _was_ there, the farther away from my house, the more indistinct the houses and streets became. I could see my immediate neighbor's houses just fine, but beyond that everything got kind of blurry.

Then I looked down at myself. I was wearing a plain red shirt and jeans. I smirked. While I hadn't really expected much in the way of a default outfit, I admit I was disappointed. I **knew **my subconscious was more creative than this. I flexed my will, and the shirt turned a slightly lighter shade of red and turned into one of my favorite shirts from back home. Specifically, large white characters appeared across my chest, spelling out

**I Brought the Awesome.**

**What did you bring?**

I chuckled to myself as the familiar fabric rustled across my form.

_Of all the things from back home that I miss, I think my collection of funny shirts is going to sting the most. Right after plumbing, running water, my cell phone, my laptop, the internet…_

**_My family…._**

I turned around hurriedly and walked back into the house to try to find something to distract myself from **that **train of thought, lest I attract a despair demon to my humble abode. This was the house I grew up in. The place I knew better than any other location in the world. The place where I had constructed my memory palaces back in high school. I knew the fade was constantly shifting, but I also knew that living will left an impression in fabric of its existence. I had no idea how, but I was certain there must be some way to turn the house into a base of operations in the fade.

_My Dream House_

I facepalmed hard at the truly awful pun that had ghosted into my thoughts, but I still chuckled to myself. It was technically an accurate description. As I studied the TV room, I pondered my next steps. I didn't know anything about how to manipulate this realm other than bits and pieces of lore from the games and the novels. I wasn't sure if I and my mental construct needed energy or time or some other factor before this place would become accessible to other spirits…. And dreamers. On one hand, I did not want Solas to figure out anything about me that I didn't want him to know. On the other hand, I was sure this base would come in handy for something. Not to mention that Solas finding traces of my will and thoughts here was inevitable. He knew more about this realm then anyone alive.

_Besides, most of this will be strange to him, but while it is at least possible he might be aware of the existence of other worlds, he would never have been to them. He won't know what any of the electronics are. _

_Or would he? I came here in a dream after all. That argues that the fade at least touches other worlds. Enough for someone with his insights to maybe spy on an extra-terrestrial dream or two. I can't do anything about the house or the driveway, but I should try to get rid of the electronics. He could probably learn a lot from the memories attached to them anyway, with how much time and emotional investment I've put into TV and videogames in this house._

Having decided my course, I went through the house erasing all traces of advanced society from my house. It was harder than I thought. I wouldn't have had the focus to replace the items with empty space or medieval counterpart furniture if I was doing it all in my head. But in the fade, I could mold reality itself to my will, and as the saying goes, seeing is believing. Also, I nearly cried when I erased my consoles, widescreen tv, and videogame collection from my man cave in the basement.

Finally, I was done, and I stood again in the hallway inside the front door. I turned around to go back to my room to think, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed something alarming. THE TV WAS STILL THERE!

I let out a frustrated groan.

"God damn it! I suppose that means none of the other changes stuck either?" I asked the empty room.

"Of course they didn't! This place is significant to you. You cannot change it on a whim!" A new voice butted in from right behind me, scaring the shit out of me. I whirled around to face the intruder. The first glimpse I had of the intruder was blurry, a bit like the houses down the street. However, that blur was so fast I would've thought that I had imagined it if I wasn't in the fade. The man I saw as I finished my pirouette was one that I recognized.

Slightly over 5 feet tall, shoulders slightly broader than mine, wearing similar modern clothes. He had a mop of curly brown hair, and a scruffy mustache with matching goatee. Most distinctive, however, was his almost absurdly wide and bright smile. It was my old college buddy, Ryan Stone. However, I sincerely doubted my friend truly had come to Thedas. No god worth their title would ever inflict both me **AND **him on the same primitive planet at the same time. It wouldn't be healthy for the inhabitants. Which meant he was probably a spirit.

Not-Ryan did not move or speak. It was only then that I noticed that I had had conjured a thick wooden staff into my hand. Slowly, I lowered it, and was only mildly surprised that I recognized the implement. Sized for a tall man like myself, the head it was inscribed with a dozen arcane looking runes that glowed red as if they were windows into the heart of a bonfire.

It was my mental picture of the wizard staff of one Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, professional wizard private investigator of Chicago. One of my favorite wizards in the realm of fantasy.

These thoughts and realizations burned through my thoughts in a second, and I stared at my guest, and slowly lowered my guard. As I understood it, spirits in the fade took forms that most closely matched their purpose in the mind of whoever they were speaking to. Any spirit who appeared to me in **his** shape, would not mean me harm.

"Who…are you," I asked him slowly.

He kept staring at me a moment. This was enough to confirm to me that it was not really my friend who stood before me. Much like myself, Ryan didn't really understand how to shut the hell up.

The spirit smirked at me and challenged in a playful tone,

"Guess."

I pondered his request, and considered what I knew about this spirit:

It appeared to me in the body of a friend, and probably meant me no harm. It had snuck up behind me, offered advice, and then asked a question without introducing himself. That meant it was likely a virtue spirit and not a demon. But which one? The answer lied in his chosen body; I was sure. I reflected on my experiences with my old friend, trying to distill the essence that would make him attractive to the entity before me.

Ryan Stone and I had a lot in common. He was an intelligent, autistic, weird son of rich white people in San Francisco. I was an intelligent, autistic, weird son of rich white people from New York/Jersey. We both respected each other's intellect and ignored the oddities that had defined us in the eyes of others. What I admired most about him the most was his openness to new ideas. To hear him describe it, the bay area was a hotbed of almost any kind of creative endeavor or scientific pursuit imaginable, and he kept up with as many of those efforts as he possibly could. To Ryan, nothing had been impossible. Space travel? It was inevitable and would probably happen inside of 5 years. AI? He personally knew people who were making one. He once told me that he had volunteered for, and then went out to dinner with Francis Ford Copula. Give him an ear, and he could always talk your ear off about some kind of ridiculous, impossible sounding piece of technology that someone in Silicon Valley was cooking up. I envied him his sense of endless optimism and confidence. I had always been crippled by self esteem issues, depression and laziness. Given those traits…

"Creativity." I stated.

Not-Ryan's smile got even wider.

"Astute guess, but no. I am Curiosity. You were very close though. I am good friends with many creativity spirits."

I couldn't really be mad at not guessing. He was right, I had been so close it almost made no difference. In fact, I was certain that Creativity would have taken Ryan's form too.

"So what were you saying about not being able to change my environment? How come? This is **my **dream, created from **my **mind."

"Exactly! So, when you imagine this place you know so well in your head, you picture it as it has always been. This place has great meaning to you, and MANY memories. Your conception of it is quite solid." The spirit informed me pleasantly.

My shoulders slumped. That made sense, but it was not very good for me.

"But I need to keep my true origins secret from Solas! The construction of this house is bad enough, but electronics are a dead giveaway!" I whined.

Curiosity smirked.

"Mage, you forget just where you are. This house is absolutely _drenched _in your feelings and memories. One such as he would barely need to enter this dream realm to understand that much about you."

I sighed.

"Well that's just fantastic. How am I supposed to hide from him then?"

"Just don't use this house." He chuckled. He waved his hand at the hallway around him. There a strange feeling of loss, as if something had been forcibly ripped out of my hand. The world around me swirled chaotically, resolving into… the library in my elementary school. He had to have gotten that from me! How could I keep him out of my head? I thought over the problem, and then tried to reach for my mana.

The next thing I knew, I was on the floor of the library, tears flowing down my face and a searing headache pounding inside my skull.

"Fuck that hurt! What the hell just happened?" I snarled viciously.

Curiosity chuckled again.

"Silly mortal! _Everything _here is made of what you would call mana. You have a little puddle of it down there inside your… what was the word? Body? Yes that was it. Your body. But here it is the opposite. Trying to access the mana directly here would be taking a deep breath underwater. It would be like drowning, but for your soul!"

I stared at him blankly, trying to process that statement. That was…terrifying. I could feel my heart beating faster and the bottom drop out of my stomach. The library began to darken, the shadows lengthening naturally like some kind of cheesy cartoon, only frighteningly real.

Curiosity frowned at me for the first time.

"Stop that!" he snapped at me.

"How the fuck am I supposed to do that?!" I yelled at him.

"Stop leaking your panic everywhere! You'll attract fear demons, and those guys are all assholes. They taint everything they touch with negativity just by showing up, and they never have ANYTHING interesting to talk about. They just scream all the time. 'Hello friend, have you discovered any interesting dreams lately?' and their just like 'AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA'

Its annoying!" He said indignantly.

I kept staring at him throughout his little snit and burst out laughing.

Between breaths I gasped out,

"I didn't know curiosity had a sense of humor!"

He frowned at me again.

"I most certainly do** not**. Do I LOOK like amusement to you!" he said, sounding insulted. This only made me laugh harder.

"Yeah, yeah, get it out of your system." He said, folding his arms and tapping his feet impatiently.

Taking note of his obvious annoyance, I got a hold of myself, taking deep breaths and trying to reclaim my equilibrium.

"Is that better?" I asked him.

"Much." He paused. "Now before I was so _rudely _interrupted, I was telling you about how to hide your origins from the wolf."

My mind latched onto that.

"How?" I demanded.

Curiosity paused again, an unfamiliar look ghosting across his face.

"Wow, that was… I believe you would call it, Spicy? Yes. That was some spicy need! I haven't felt a desire for knowledge like that in looong time! Delicious!"

"Excuse me. Do you mean that you just…ATE…my feeling of curiosity for the information?!" I said, stunned.

"Well of course I did my boy! I am avatar and embodiment of curiosity. What did you think I ate? Chicken?!" He scoffed.

"I… I thought you didn't need to eat. You just exist to act on the emotion you embody." I said haltingly.

"That is true, I don't NEED to eat, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy it! You humans have so many different flavors of emotion. The different forms and intensities of your curiosity for knowledge is like a fine wine to me. Not to mention it helps me grow in power. Now can you stop changing the damn subject!" He snapped.

I nodded.

"The first thing you need to understand is that this dream **is not **inside your head. We are in the fade. Dreams are the closest you humans come to claiming a demesne in the fade like we spirits do. But that claim can be contested, even stolen. And since most of you aren't even conscious when you do it, it is exceptionally easy for us to do that. Mages, on the other hand, are fully aware of what and where they are, but since they only come here when they are asleep, they end up leaving the place deserted half the time, free for the taking. With me so far?"

I nodded.

"As for hiding your domain from the wolf… the short answer that you can't. The wolf is one of the most powerful mages in the history of this world, and its foremost scholar on this realm. He has many powerful friends as well. If you want to try to hide your origins from him, the only chance you have would be to shape your domain according to your will and not your memories. Even then, if you were not here to maintain it, he will be able to find your memories from the imprint they have left here. Your emotions and memories were far too clear to be easily erased from the memory of this place, and he is adept at finding such records."

I nodded glumly. I was afraid it would be something like that. I had never really expected to be able to beat Solas on his home turf. But maybe my new friend could?

"If the issue is just not having a will here to maintain the place, does that mean you could do it for me? You are one of the natives, after all." I suggested.

He shook his head.

"Theoretically, a powerful spirit could do what you ask, but I certainly can't. I'm Curiosity. Keeping any knowledge secret contradicts my purpose. Even if it didn't, I am a wanderer, always searching for new knowledge. I never stay in one place."

I thought about that for a moment. I had never intended to keep my origins from Solas forever, or even Alexander and the advisors. I just needed to get my feet under me and figure out the extent of the options given me by my shiny new magic powers. Ultimately, the one thing my evolving plans absolutely required. I needed to find one of the fragments of the Archivist from the Vir Dirthara. If I could neither access the place nor find one of the remnants here in the fade, I would need to go through the much riskier and morally dubious process of trying to create another knowledge spirit. I had no idea how to do that, but there were some indications on the wiki that the archivist had originally been a spirit of wisdom. I was betting the Evanuris had probably twisted him in some way to produce a being that would function according to their needs. It certainly seemed in character for them.

In either case, a spirit of knowledge would be perfect for what I had in mind, and probably wouldn't mind staying still. Especially given the incentive I was planning to offer it.

There was still one thing I was curious about, though.

"How do you know all this? Most spirits I have heard of do not understand the mortal perspective nearly enough to be this helpful."

"Ahh…an excellent question young man. That is true. Most of my kind have very little interest in anything beyond their scope. However, my ideal is somewhat more complex than the likes of, say, peace. My mandate is the endless pursuit of knowledge. Therefore, I know a lot of stuff."

"That makes sense I suppose." I said, then froze, as a suspicion crept into the back of my mind.

"Wait a moment…You only took the form of Ryan because he resonated with you in my mind… Does that mean that your personality is a reflection of mine too?" I said, a mixture of horror and amusement in my tone.

He smiled at me.

"My, you are a clever one. The answer is yes, but only partially. I am very old, human. Old enough to have what passes for an identity amongst my kind. However, we are still very different beings, so in order to make myself understood by your kind I have to 'borrow' from you. I rather like this form though. Your mind is so refreshingly novel, compared to most of the mortals I have known. Usually, dreamers are either barely even through the veil, or else the mages are so suspicious and afraid that they are never willing to engage me in conversation. Noted scholars, pursuers of knowledge, and they won't talk to me, because they're afraid I'm a desire demon. ME!" He said.

To my shock, as he ranted, words formed on his t-shirt, reading:

**Apparently I have an Attitude.**

**Who fucking knew?**

Seeing another one of the shirts from my collection on the spirit led me to another revelation about my new friend, which made me burst out laughing again.

He frowned at me, but before he could speak, I pointed to his chest. He saw the words, looked back up at me and scowled. I continued laughing.

"Now I know where you got a sense of humor from!" I said, fighting my laughter for breath. I pointed my thumbs at my chest.

"This Guy!" I doubled over laughing.

The frown didn't leave his face, and I heard him mutter "Well, nobody is perfect." This, of course, just made me laugh harder. Still chuckling, I got off the couch, and put a hand on my new friend's shoulder.

"You're Curiosity right? The endless pursuit of knowledge?"

He looked at me in utter confusion. I chuckled again.

"Want to see something cool?"

His face cleared.

"Always!" he said, and I started leading him downstairs to the widescreen TV.

I smiled.

"I knew there was a reason I liked you!"

We spent the rest of the night watching my memories on the TV like they were movies. I didn't go in any particular order. In fact, most of the time our next feature was brought up by the discussion we had about the last one. By the end, we ended up trying to stump one another with riddles, which he apparently had a fascination with. When I woke up the next day, I had never been happier that I could now remember my dreams.

* * *

Notes:

I have so much free time now, what with the quarantine, that I am hoping to get a bunch of chapters out in a shorter period than normal, but Im so new at this, I am worried the quality might suffer. Please don't hesitate to tell me your thoughts in the comments. I want to know what you guys think.

Stay safe  
Jokeslayer94


	8. No Separation of Church and State

**Chapter 7:**

**No Separation of Church and State**

The next morning, I awoke in my bed. My real one this time. The brown-haired servant elf I vaguely remembered from the games was saying something, but my body and mind were still in sleep mode. I tried to go back to sleep, wanting to get back to the dream I'd been having of….

_Oooooooohhhh._

The events of my dream came back to me with a clarity unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I knew in an instant that these memories, unlike those of my chaotic earth dreams, would not fade after I got up. Without a dream to hang onto, my mind reluctantly refocused on the real world.

"…lord are you awake?" She questioned in a raised voice.

"mmmup, immup" I muttered.

"What was that your worship?"

That woke me up.

I jerked upright, heedless of my state of undress.

"**What** did you call me?" I asked incredulously.

The girl turned around hurriedly.

"The whole encampment has heard of your…visions. Only the gods know the future, your worship."

I snatched up the shorts (breeches?) and shirt someone had left at the foot of the bed and put them on, then I snatched up my robes from had left them on the…floor?

"Where are my robes?"

"Your worship should not leave his clothes on the floor. I took them away for the wash. Please do not do that again… we do not have many other sets for someone of your height." She said in a decidedly less respectful tone.

_Nice going, suburban commando… You are in a log cabin in the middle of an isolated nowhere town in the mountains of what is essentially medieval England. It's not like mom is around to vacuum the fucking carpet._

I walked over to the small armoire and opened it to reveal another set of plain grey robes, which I donned gratefully. As a New Englander, I was far more comfortable in the cold than the heat, but that didn't mean I didn't need a thick outer layer. I turned around to look at the servant girl.

"First off, please do not call me worship or holiness or anything like that. I have done nothing to earn such praise. My name is James. If I must have an honorific, please just Ser is fine. What is your name, by the way?"

"My name is Galena, your – Ser James." She did a little curtsey.

I kneeled over to put on my socks and boots. In my opinion, behind the magic powers, my favorite part of my new reality was that no one would ever again think it was weird that I preferred knee socks. After all, this planet didn't have sneakers. Although I realized with a grimace that my boots didn't fit me perfectly. I would have to get better ones at some point. Probably in Val Royeux.

"Now then Galena, you mentioned something about a meeting?" I asked, taking a sip from my waterskin to clear away the taste of sleep.

"Yes ser, the inner circle is meeting in the chantry in an hour to plan. The lord herald wanted me to wake you up if you weren't already up by now, since he wishes you to attend." She told me.

"I am grateful. I have never been the early rising type you see. In fact, I would appreciate if you or one of the staff would come to wake me up around sunrise if that is not an imposition on anyone's duties. I am not a morning person, but I will do what I must for the inquisition." I stated boldly. I was kind of enjoying being able to talk in these grandiose terms. It felt more…significant…than most modern vernacular and slang.

"While I'm in Haven, I mean." I added hastily. "I don't believe any of you will be accompanying the herald and his party into the field. Besides, on the road, I have no doubt that the lady seeker will be happy to…. ensure my timely awakening." I said sarcastically.

Galena giggled.

"I'm sure you are right, Ser James."

* * *

Over a quick breakfast of bland stew in the tavern, I considered my next move. Back home, I would have spent this time reading my kindle and in truth, finding a book to read did have its advantages. Although I knew a fair bit about this world already, one could never have enough knowledge. However, I had been a bookworm in my pretend backstory. The chantry probably didn't have anything worth the time of someone as "well-read" as I was. I could seek out Solas and learn or otherwise practice magic, but I had been doing that for almost 24 straight hours if you counted the dream. Which I did.

As awesome as my magic was, and as powerful as I was likely to become by combining my magic with my earthen insights, in this moment, the most valuable asset I could provide the inquisition with was my knowledge.

I had a head full of bombs to drop on the inquisition and the people of Thedas: from the titans to the true identity of Solas. Of course, not only were those revelations completely useless to us right now, I couldn't prove any of them. Arguably the most useful arrow in my quiver right now was the tranquility cure. Tranquility was one of the biggest bones of contention in the conflict between the mages and templars. If handled correctly, the cure could be a huge help to the Inquisition's mandate to restore order. However, I was going to need a plan if I wanted to get that piece onto the board without others becoming suspicious of me.

That covered plans for the long term. What game knowledge did I have about the immediate future?

I had vague notions of trying to manipulate events so that we had firmer roots in Ferelden than we had in the game. I could still remember how surprised I'd been to Ferelden's hostility towards the "Orlesian" Inquisition when I'd played Trespasser. Ultimately though, fixing the Hinterlands was not a job that I could circumvent with prophecy. It could only be done with boots on the ground.

Still relatively unsure what to do with myself, I got up and wandered around Haven. I was shocked to discover that it really was as small as it had been in the game. I had always believed the levels in the game had been smaller to accommodate the limited memory and graphics of a videogame. However, while would eat my boot if Val Royeux was really just a Central square and some cross streets, Haven really was just a small mountain town. I considered trying to find some better equipment, but I had no money. I didn't really want to hang out by the training yards, since I was a known mage and I didn't want to deal with suspicious templars. Without even realizing it, I found my feet carrying me towards the chantry. As I entered the building, I was noticeably warmed by the many candles that lined the walls. With that warmth came a… weight, in the air. My magical senses were reporting to me that there was a faint concentration of emotions in this place, but I didn't really need magic to tell me that. I had felt this presence before in houses of worship. This was a place where men talked with god.

A sister came out of one of the hallways with a taper and headed to one of the alcoves. I called out to her.

"Sister?"

She turned to me, starting a little when she recognized me.

"Yes, your worship?"

I scowled.

_Not this shit again!_

Out loud I said,

"Please don't call me that I beg you. I am James, or Ser James if you insist. I am no holy man."

"Very well Ser James," She said with a kind smile on her face, "What do you wish of me?"

"Is there a smaller chapel somewhere in here, with some privacy? I prefer to pray in private." I requested.

"Of course Ser, I will show you the way." She said.

She led me off to the right (A direction that had never been rendered in Inquisition, but that I faintly remembered from Origins.) She led me to a small room reminiscent of the chapel off the garden at Skyhold. Candles, small alter, statue of Andraste against the far wall, it was perfect. I smiled at the sister.

"Thank you, this is perfect." I said to the sister gratefully.

She nodded to me.

"It is nothing, ser, truly." Then she turned and shut the door behind her, leaving me alone in the chapel. I sat on the altar, and just soaked in the silent atmosphere of the place.

I have never really gone in much for organized religion. That's not to say that I don't believe in god. I decided very early on that the universe around me was FAR too complex and awesome to have just occurred by accident. The idea of a higher power made perfect sense to me. However, while I was brought up as a reform Jew, I mostly had no patience for long, drawn out services. I hated getting dressed up and made to stand and sit through the various blessings, singing Hebrew prayers I barely understood. I might have cast aside Judaism entirely were it not for my deep respect for the rabbi at my synagogue, who defined for me what it truly meant to be a "Holy man". Still, my philosophy is that prayer is both deeply personal, and not all that complicated. God is omniscient. He knows each and every one of us intimately, and is present at all times in all places.

So, I figured I could just talk to him as though he were another person.

"Hey man." I said to the empty room that somehow didn't _feel _empty.

"I know it's been awhile since I talked to you, I kinda had a lot goin on in my life back on earth. I'm fairly sure that you and the "Maker" are the same being, though if you're not, then I figure you know each other, so if this is the Maker I'm talking to, could you relay the message to… Yahweh? Adonai? Divine Upper Management...?

Anyway, as I'm sure you already know, my life has changed significantly over the past few days. I've been whisked away to a fantasy world like I always kinda hoped I would be. I have awesome magical powers. Thanks for those by the way. I know the future and the past of the world around me, because for some arcane reason apparently Bioware didn't so much write games as tear a hole in reality and peep in on a different universe. No wonder they were my favorite game studio. I'm not even going to question the whole future knowledge bit. Just thinking about that sort of thing makes my head hurt. Either way, even though it feels awesome right now, I am intimately aware of just how bad this is going to get for me. I'll have to…kill people. I'm honestly not sure what that's gonna do to me."

My voice started cracking, and I could feel tears starting to form at the corners of my eyes.

"I'm…scared. On one hand, this whole thing is almost literally my dream come true. On the other hand, we both know how fucked up my dreams can be. If I fuck this up like everything else in my old life, it won't just be me paying the price. Corypheus could almost literally turn this planet into hell. Millions could die. Hundreds already have. This isn't a game anymore. It isn't an escape from reality anymore."

My vision was starting to blur now.

"Lastly, while I mostly agree that, possibility of failure aside, I am better off on Thedas than I was on earth, that's not to say I left **nothing **behind. I love my family, and I'm certain that vanishing off the face of the earth will hurt them badly. I know I don't really have the right to ask for this kind of thing, but could I ask that you somehow convey the message to them that I am alive, I love them all, and…"

Tears were streaming down my face by now, my voice nearly hoarse with emotion,

"Tell them that I will be alright, and that they don't need to worry about me?!"

After that, my composure shattered. I wept uncontrollably, grieving for the family I would never see again, and the pain I had most likely caused them. They had always been there for me, and had supported and guided me for my entire life. Through all the failures in my past, with all my issues. Past the point when other people would have given up on me.

I stayed there like that for some time, just letting out all the tears. Eventually though, the well ran dry. I stood up and wiped away my tears. I faced the Andraste statue and spoke the same thing I always did when I was done praying.

"Please, God. Give me peace, give me guidance, give me wisdom." I bowed to the statue, and left the chapel, my steps echoing behind me as I walked back to the main entrance.

* * *

I walked into the war room to find Leliana and Cullen already there. Arguing.

_Fantastic_

"Magic is what caused this whole mess in the first place! Tossing more magic at the problem will just make things worse!" Cullen was saying.

Before I could stop myself, it just slipped out…

"Careful commander, your Kinloch is showing."

That shut them both right up. Cullen's face went pale and his face twisted into rictus of part rage, part fear, and part…some other emotion I couldn't place. I'm not good at reading people.

I face palmed, and let out a disappointed sigh.

"Goddamn it. I should not have said that. I'm… I'm so sorry Cullen. I can't afford to run my mouth like some child when my head is full of all this stuff I shouldn't know. I'm sorry I brought up those memories. At least I didn't let anyone know who didn't already know." I said, glancing up at Leliana, whose eyes widened. I shrugged.

"The overthrow of Kinloch Hold was a very momentous event. Both for the violence and power unleashed that day, and for how significant the tower is to the man who saved it."

"Felix…" Leliana breathed, a flash of emotion crossing her face.

I shrugged at her. I was going to continue, but at that moment the door opened to admit Alexander, Josephine and Cassandra. Saved by the bell.

Josephine took a look around, immediately picking up on the tense atmosphere.

"Is something wrong?"

Before Cullen could say anything inflammatory, I jumped in.

"I ran my mouth and said something I should not have. I was in the process of apologizing." I grimaced. "I told you I wasn't all that great at…people, Ambassador."

She eyed me for a moment. "So you did, Ser Black." Alexander winced in sympathy, but glanced over at Cullen, and said nothing. Leliana took all of us and our reactions in, having regained her composure almost before the Herald had finished walking in.

Alexander cleared his throat. "Ok, so Cassandra said you had a plan." He nodded to me "And you said you wanted to accompany us to the Hinterlands, so I'm guessing that's where the plan is. So what exactly is in the Hinterlands? I traveled through those lands on the way to the Conclave. The whole place is a giant mess."

She glanced at me, then back to Alexander.

"I said that your mark needs more power to close the Breach for good."

From there, Leliana and Cullen resumed their argument about approaching the mages or the Templars. Once they finished beating that dead horse, the script changed.

Josephine interjected,

"Unfortunately, neither group will even speak to us yet. The Chantry has denounced the Inquisition –specifically, the two of you."

Alexander smirked.

"That was quick. The chantry never could pass up the chance to blame someone else. "

"Shouldn't they be busy arguing over who's going to become Divine?" complained Cullen.

"Some are calling you the 'Herald of Andraste,' and that frightens the Chantry. The remaining Clerics have declared it blasphemy, and we heretics for harboring you."

"Chancellor Roderick's doing, no doubt." Cassandra said.

"It limits our options. Approaching the mages or Templars for help is currently out of the question." Continued Josephine.

"How exactly am I the 'Herald of Andraste?" asked Alexander.

"People saw what you did at the temple, how you stopped the Breach from growing. They have also heard about the woman seen in the rift when we first found you. They believe that was Andraste." She turned and looked directly at me.

"They also _saw_ the brilliant flash of light that erupted atop the mountain before the Breach closed. Rumors are spreading that the flash was the work of a mysterious and powerful mage seer who fell out of the breach itself and proclaimed himself "Prophet of the Maker".

"Oh for the love of!" I growled, and face palmed so hard my hand hurt. "Yes I can see the future, but my visions are not divinely inspired. I am a _seer,_ not a prophet! More importantly, **I am unnecessary**. Alexander and the mark are at the heart of this." I sighed. You will all succeed with or without me. I have seen it. I just hoped to grease the wheels a little so fewer people died."

Cullen looked at me wearily, "That answers the question I was going to ask you, "Prophet", but what about you Alexander?"

Alexander's head tilted his head slightly, "How come he's the Prophet of the _Maker_, and I'm the whatever of _Andraste_?" he said petulantly.

Cullen stared at him with another complicated expression. I laughed. Josephine snickered and even Leliana grinned. Cassandra scowled.

Leliana settled herself and continued.

"People are desperate for a sign of hope. For some, you're that sign."

"And to others, a symbol of everything that's gone wrong." Said Josephine

Alexander shook his head in disbelief.

"They aren't more concerned about the blasted hole in the sky that rains demons? You know, the **real** threat?"

"They do know that it is a threat, they just don't think we can stop it." Stated the commander.

"The Chantry is telling everyone that you'll make it worse."

"There is something you can do. A Chantry Cleric by the name Mother Giselle has asked to speak to you. She is not far, and knows those involved far better than I. Her assistance could be invaluable." Added Leliana.

"I'll see what she has to say." Agreed Alexander.

Leliana nodded "You'll find Mother Giselle tending to the wounded in the Hinterlands near Redcliffe. While you are there, be mindful that you are the face of this organization. The Hinterlands will be the Inquisition's first test of our actual ability to do as we said we would. Closing the breaches will give you and your combat team valuable experience, and add to your reputation as the only one who can close the rifts." Next she turned her gaze on the Commander. "As the Herald and his allies deal with the demons, he will find or loot many useful resources, and I believe the refugees will gladly pledge themselves to us. The people of Ferelden are courageous and resourceful."

Nodded Cullen, a proud gleam in his eyes, "They are at that."

"Lastly," continued Leliana, turning now to Josephine, "Our success will earn us the gratitude of Ferelden, and prove to any doubters that we are truly committed to our purpose."

Alexander stared blankly for a moment, envisioning what the nightingale was saying. Then he collected himself, and stood up a little straighter.

"Then it seems that our course has been set. I assume we are leaving in the morning?"

Cullen nodded.

"Quartermaster Threnn will prepare your supplies. You will accompany Corporal Vale to the village of Crossroads, which he and his company will secure as our base of operations in the region. While you're out closing the breaches, would you approach horsemaster Dennet of Redcliff? He is one of the best horse breeders and stablemasters in Thedas, and we could use the cavalry."

I perked up at that.

"About that… The horsemaster will gladly join us, but his precondition is the securing of his homestead, since he'd be leaving his wife and son to manage his holdings. He will want watchtowers constructed around the region to maintain security."

Cullen looked at me speculatively.

"That should not be difficult, and it is a good idea besides. They can act as outposts for our forces."

I nodded to him.

After that, we got into the wartable missions from the game. Cullen agreed to give Josephine some troops to make money as caravan guards. Leliana informed us that she was sending some agents to Kirkwall to seek out the Black Emporium, on advice from Varric. We discussed the invitation sent to us from the Fergus Cousland, to attend a vigil for Devine Justinia. Ultimately, we went with sending a diplomatic team composed of some of the Templars we had who knew Justinia. I mostly observed. I noticed that we had no word of Alexander's relatives stirring up trouble trading on the legend of "the Herald of Andraste". I wondered if there was some way of capitalizing on the side quests of the other possible inquisitors. I turned that thought over in my head for a minute, then spoke.

"Leliana?"

She glanced at me.

"Yes James?"

"Do… Do we have any way to identify the bodies of the victims from the Conclave blast?" All eyes turned to me as the room went silent.

"We have identified those we could, but that is a precious few. Between the demons and the blast itself, many of the bodies have been damaged beyond recognition. Why do you ask?" she said in a subdued tone.

"There were many important people at the Conclave. If we could identify their bodies, we could offer to return them to their respective kin for proper burial, or at least return any items of theirs that survived. At a bare minimum, we could keep a list of the names so that eventually, when we are not so strapped for resources, we could commission a memorial of some kind." I suggested.

Everyone sat a moment, digesting the idea. Josephine was the first to break the silence.

"I like it. Showing respect for the dead, even in the midst of crisis, will win us many admirers. The problem is, I do not know of any way we could do it. Some of the bodies…" her voice trailed off, her bronze skin turning a sickly grey color.

Leliana was visibly deep in thought, until she suddenly snapped her fingers.

An absolutely evil grin appeared on her face, reminding me briefly of my younger sister.

"Cassaaaandraaaa," she said in a sing-song voice.

In the game, I had seen Cassandra stand up to everything from Red Templars to High dragons, without once showing fear. I had been under the impression she was completely fearless. That impression shattered when I saw the horrified expression on her face at Leliana's tone.

"Wha-What is it Leliana" she snapped out.

"You wouldn't happen to know anyone who specialized in _showing respect to the dead_, would you?" she asked the Seeker sweetly, almost radiating smug satisfaction.

Cassandra's eyes narrowed, then her shoulders slumped and she growled. She actually lifted her hand to point at Josephine as she snarled.

"HAVE. HER. DO IT! She's the Ambassador isn't she?!

Cullen and Alexander were looking between the three powerful women warily, clearly not sure what was going on. Josephine apparently did though, and she burst out laughing. This had the unfortunate effect of momentarily robbing me of the ability to think, since it made her even more beautiful than she already was.

"I will write the request if you wish, but you will have to sign it. The request will mean more coming from you. _Lady Pentaghast_." She said with a smug smile of her own.

Cassandra growled again.

"No! I will write the request. If you did, they would know it was not me who wrote the thing." she huffed. Before she could keep going, Cullen butted in.

"Excuse me Seeker, but what in Andraste's name are you talking about?"

She just glared at him. It was Josephine who answered him.

"The Mortalitasi. The death mages who maintain the great Necropolis in Nevarra city. If any mages on Thedas knew a way to identify the Conclave victims, it would be their order. Since they are deeply entrenched in Nevarran politics, it would be best for Cassandra to contact them, since she is," she chuckled "_technically_, a member of the royal family."

Cullen smirked.

"That's genius Leliana!" Alexander praised.

_Why didn't I think of that?_ I privately agreed.

The praise for her tormentor was evidently too much for the lady knight. She whirled around and stormed out of the room.

There was another moment of silence, broken this time by Alexander.

"Aaaaaand on that note, I think we can call this meeting to a close. Come on James. If we're leaving tomorrow, then we need to work on your barriers. You'll need them to protect yourself from her wrath, since you were the one who brought it up."


	9. The Mad Mage

The caravan made its way across the dusty roads of the Hinterlands in relative silence, with only the songs of the birds for company. The forest was seemingly empty of wildlife, the animals having long since equated large groups of humans with certain death in these dark times. It was not a large caravan as such things went, having only 2 wagons of assorted supplies. It made up for this deficiency with an abundance of chain-mail clad soldiers, wearily eyeing the seemingly serene countryside for any hint of danger. At the head of the column strode, the tall, black haired form of Alexander Trevelyan, the uneasy "Herald of Andraste".

Alexander was happy for the long stretch of (relative) silence, since he had a lot on his mind. Over the past few days, almost everyone he knew from the tower had died, he had lost part of his memory, been branded with a poorly understood but vastly powerful magic, fought demons, became almost invaluable to a multinational organization with theoretically unlimited political freedom, been labeled as a pseudo messiah, met a mysterious seer and been the subject of a frankly absurd prophecy.

It was really quite a lot to take in. At least he'd met Varric Tethras. His sister was going to be so jealous.

Now that he had a moment to take stock, Alexander was a little shocked by how Ok he felt about it all. He had a purpose. For the first time in his life, he felt like he could actually do something worthwhile with his life. Growing up, Alexander had found the politics and business management of house Trevelyan to be stifling and boring. When he'd come into his power, he'd been so happy, but unfortunately, in the tower, ingenuity and innovation were ignored at best, and punished at worst. Alexander had finally found something he was good at, but no one would let him use it to do anything!

The Inquisition was different. They would not let politics or rules or tradition or count whoever-the-fuck's money stand in the way of doing what needed to be done to save the world from one of the most terrifying threats in the history of Thedas. And maybe, just_ maybe,_ they could leave the world better than they had found it once they were done fixing everything.

If someone had asked him back in the tower if thought something like what the inquisition was attempting was feasible, he would have called it naïve and doomed to failure. But the Conclave had changed that. Crises like these tended to bring out the best in people, he knew, from his study of history. The Grey Wardens, the rebel king of Ferelden and the hero of River Dane, and many others were living embodiments of this truth.

Also, causes like this did not just bring out the best in people. They also tended to attract the best **people**, as well, Alexander mused.

The advisors all seemed _extremely _competent. Cullen was a shining example of all the best qualities of the templar order. The legendary sister Nightingale, companion of the hero of Ferelden and left hand of the divine was just plain **scary**, and even if he disliked politics intensely, he still understood it enough to know how great an asset Lady Montilyet was.

Then there were his current companions.

Alexander glanced around as he took them in.

Varric Tethras needed no introduction, considering his name was on practically every bookshelf in Thedas. He was just as witty and intelligent as Alexander had always hoped he would be. The real surprise was that crossbow. Alexander had never seen or heard of anything like it anywhere. It was a frighteningly powerful weapon, and the dwarf was absolutely **lethal **with the thing. Even more curious, the story of how he had acquired it, and why it was named "Bianca" was the one story the normally chatty man refused to part with.

Next, his gaze fell on the Lady Seeker. According to his sister, the "Hero of Orlais" had supposedly killed a high dragon single handedly when a maleficar had sent it to assassinate the Divine. He had managed to pry the real story out of her at Haven, and he had to admit that the truth was still remarkably impressive. He was sympathetic to her estrangement from her royal heritage, as well. Alexander had only been the heir to a moderately powerful house from the Free Marches. She was _technically _a princess of Nevara. He shuddered trying to imagine how stifling **that **must have been to someone as strong willed as she evidently was.

Then his gaze fell on the two other mages of his acquaintance. They both had a lot in common, to Alexander's discerning eye. Both were immensely powerful and _ferociously _intelligent. Neither one of them was properly circle trained, one claiming a basic experience as the apprentice of a Rivaini seer, one claiming to _self-taught_, of all things.

If Alexander guessed correctly, they were also both liars.

There were no such thing as self-taught mages. Solas was almost certainly trained as a Dalish Keeper. Presumably, he left due to his rather un-orthodox contempt for his Dalish fellows. He knew more about the Fade than anyone Alexander had ever met, and his theories about the true nature of spirits were of immense interest to him, ever since Creativity had helped him survive his harrowing. The strange elf just seemed to know more about magic in general & specific than was remotely possible if he were truly self-taught. He was OBVIOUSLY hiding something. But he had saved Alexander's life after the Conclave explosion, and it had been him that had helped Alexander figure out how to use the mark to close the rifts. He was here to help. At a time like this, that was enough.

Then there was James…

There was just something…**off** about the man. He rarely spoke in public, yet had no fear to speak in front of Alexander. Most of the time his eyes were disturbingly lifeless, until all of a sudden, they blazed with unbridled intelligence and furious enthusiasm. Usually when talking about magic. He had the education and health of a noble, yet the posture, social naivete and… table manners of a commoner. Unlike Solas, it was clear he did not initially know that much about magic, but he was picking it up at a rate that was frankly, terrifying. Alexander simply did not know how to contend with the strange twists and turns the man's mind took on a regular basis. Deep down, he was a little jealous of the odd mage's seeming complete lack of fear of his own powers. Not that Alexander was afraid of his abilities, but his fundamental understanding of magic since even before he got any, was that magic was inherently dangerous, and needed to be tightly controlled. These two men alone were enough to crack the foundation of that belief, though he had only known them but a few days.

Strangest of all, although Alexander was certain that he would have remembered James had they ever met in the past, (he was an exceedingly difficult character to forget) James was somehow…_familiar _to him. The impression was extremely hard to pin down.

Alexander's musings were interrupted by a white-hot flare of agony in his right hand, making him cry out in pain. Instantly, everyone stopped moving, their eyes trained on him. The only exception was Solas, who rushed forward and grabbed his hand.

Cassandra's voice cracked through the silence like a whip.

"What is wrong? Are we in any danger?" She asked the him.

"I don't know. I am new to the saving the world business." he gasped out, still dealing with the pain, although it was fading fast due to …something the elf mage had done.

Solas raised his head and looked around at the group.

"The mark is extremely sensitive to the fade in general, and the breach in particular. I believe it is reacting to similar energies in its vicinity. I believe we are near a rift." He said.

Tension spread out from that revelation like ripples in a pond, leaving in its wake only soldiers and warriors preparing for battle.

Varric and Cassandra drew their weapons.

"Scouts! Spread out and search for the rift and report back!" Cassandra barked out. 5 leather armored bodies ran up, saluted the seeker, and ran off into the woods on either side of the road.

There the party waited in tense silence, broken only by…James? The strange man was incessantly tapping out some kind of rhythm on the side of one of the supply carts.

"Will you knock that off, lightshow?" Called out Varric.

"Knock what… oh the tapping? Sorry, that's something of a nervous tic. Half the time I don't even realize I'm doing it. Its just, this is going to be my first experience of combat. It hasn't really sunk in yet." He babbled.

Alexander could sympathize. He wasn't exactly a hardened veteran himself, but he had at least trained in self-defense at the circle, even if he had never used that training in real combat until the temple of sacred ashes.

James continued.

"Don't get me wrong, I have no intention of ever being on the front line. I'm sticking firmly to flinging damage spells at range, but still."

At that moment, one of the scouts came out of the woods and motioned for them to follow. Cassandra motioned for some of the soldiers the party as they were led into the woods by the scout. As he followed the group, Alexander realized that he had been able to sense the fade rift the whole time. It had just been so radically different from any other phenomena he had ever sensed in the tower that he had not recognized it until he was this close. He caught Solas' eye and cocked his head in question. The elf nodded solemnly. They stopped as they began to make out a green glow up ahead.

Cassandra ordered the soldiers who'd been keeping pace to fan out and surround the rift, in case any of the demons tried to escape into the forest. After that, Alexander and his companions advanced on the rift. When they got to about 50 yards, he saw it. An unnatural tear in the fabric of Thedas, glowing with unnerving bright green power. Standing in front of that hole in the world, was another pride demon.

_Oh great. Another one of those…_ thought Alexander. Everyone readied their weapons in preparation, when James' voice called out softly, "Hold off a moment, I want to try something."

Everyone turned to the man incredulously. Alexander especially, was puzzled to find James sporting a look of intense concentration, his hands shoulder width apart in front of his chest, as if he were grasping some kind of spherical object. His eyes were shut tightly in concentration. Floating between his hands, was a tiny sphere of fire, no bigger than a child's marble.

It was almost comical. An attack that small could never… could never…. **_What?!_**

Alexander's jaw dropped, feeling the sheer pressure being exerted on reality by James' magic. As he watched, the tiny marble went from the red of fire, to pure white, then to blue. As the colors shifted, the very fabric of the world seemed to strain around the orb. Alexander could see the strain the working was taking on the seer, his face had gone a sickly grey color, his hands shaking. Everyone else in the clearing was staring at James with a mixture of awe, fear, and shock. Everyone that is, except Solas. He had gone almost as pale as James, but as soon as the ball turned blue, he raced up to the stricken caster and snapped out, "Release it you fool! Release it before you kill us all!"

Hearing this, James' eyes snapped open, and he splayed his hands outward. The little marble shot forward like an arrow towards the pride demon, who was barreling towards us, having detected the immense amount of magic inherent in the spell.

Then the marble hit against the demon's chest.

Instantly, the creature was engulfed in a cataclysm of fire, as a sound like the roaring of an entire army screeched through the air. When the forest stilled again, Alexander could only stare in awe.

Of the demon, there was no trace. Starting where the creature had stood was a straight line of fiery destruction going back some distance, as if the maker had smote the earth with a sword made of fire. The only thing that had survived the blast was the fade rift, though even it seemed as though it had been reduced in size. The only sounds in the clearing were the strange resonance coming from the rift, the crackling of lingering flames, and the sounds of the rest of the caravan's soldiers running frantically towards them.

Alexander was jolted out of his shock by the sound of James' voice, which was remarkably calm considering that he'd just cast one of the most destructive spells Alexander had ever even heard of.

"Hey, oh mighty chosen one… You gonna close that thing?" He said, nodding to the rift. The small movement apparently caused him to wobble on his feet. Shaking off his stupor, Alexander advanced on the rift with the mark held high above his head.

Alexander still did not entirely understand what the mark did, but he'd gotten enough practice at the temple to at least control it. It was like drawing on the fade to cast a spell, except instead of drawing on the fade, he drew on the mark. A crackling tether of emerald lightning shot from his palm and connected to the rift, its own light pulsating until it seemed to synchronize with the tear's own strange movements. Then, with a strange undulation that almost hurt to look at, the rift to the land of spirits shrunk in on itself and vanished in a crackle of more green light.

And then all was silent once again, this time not even disturbed by the songs of birds.

* * *

NOTE:

The main purpose of these aside chapters from Alexander is mostly to see how other people view James, since he himself is PROFOUNDLY ignorant of how other people see him and his actions. You may notice that while I tend to have a very descriptive writing style, I rarely talk about body language or eye ques. This is intentional. James does not notice them. Alexander does.

I have toyed with the idea of turning Alexander's narrative into a separate companion story. However the only problem is that there are a few pieces of the main story that NEED to be from his perspective.

This is NOT one of them though. I could re-write this scene from James' POV, but I still want you all to understand where Alexander is coming from, and the differences between him and me(Cough!cough!) I mean James.

Thoughts?

Stay healthy everyone  
Jokeslayer94


	10. Teldirthalen

Solas waited the rest of the day to let me have it. That night, as we sat around the campfire, he took a deep breath.

"Teldirthalen Solasan! What in all the realms of the beyond possessed you to do something so reckless! There is no way that you could have even designed that spell if you did not understand how dangerous a miscast would have been. You could have killed us all!" he snapped.

I could not meet the apostate's eyes, staring guiltily at my feet,

"It worked in the fade…" I protested.

"Foolish child!" hissed the older mage, "The material laws you bent with that spell do not exist in the fade. OF COURSE, it worked there!"

Cassandra glared at me, then her head turned to the incognito god.

"First, I think it important to establish what exactly he did. Then we can move on to why it was so dangerous. It was effective I must admit. I have never seen such powerful fire magic."

Varric's eyes darted around the fire, eventually landing on Solas.

"I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I agree with the Seeker. I've never even seen a blast like that from Waffles, and he was a scary strong fire mage!"

Alexander arched an eyebrow at the author.

"Waffles?" He asked skeptically.

"Hawke. Long story. Don't change the subject."

Solas took a deep breath.

"It is difficult to explain, but in layman's terms, he took a substantial amount of fire magic and caged it with his will. Then he shrank the prison, putting the energy under immense pressure. Then, the prison released when it struck the creature, unleashing the pressure."

Shockingly, the first person who seemed to grasp the explanation was Varric.

"So, it would be like rupturing an overfull waterskin with blow from a war-hammer?"

Solas glanced to the dwarf and nodded. When he spoke next, there was a tinge of respect in his voice.

"That is a surprisingly accurate metaphor, master dwarf. However, in this case, James was actually _shrinking _the "waterskin" with his will. The smaller the skin became, the more pressure the water puts the skin under, and the harder it was for James to maintain the skin."

He turned to glare at me.

"He could theoretically have just kept shrinking the sphere infinitely, exponentially increasing the spell's destructive potential. However, if he lost focus even for an instant, all the pressure would have been released right there in his hands. The explosion would have been fatal to him at a minimum. Likely it would have killed anyone else close to him."

Alexander butted in,

"That's ingenious! I would never have thought to try to manipulate fire in such a way!"

A small grin ghosted across my face.

"The potential of magic is infinite, for those with the right mind to understand it."

Solas' head whipped around to me and he hissed,

"Pretty words from a reckless child who only properly learned how to cast spells last week!"

At this, Cassandra's face cleared. Then immediately shifted to a disgusted huff. I'm not usually the best at reading people, but at that moment, I could practically hear her thoughts reclassifying the situation from "Magic mumbo jumbo" to "The idiot recruit almost dropped his mace on his own foot."

Solas continued in a softer voice.

"In the Circles, such a spell as this would be difficult enough to be forbidden to all but senior enchanters. You lack the fine control of your power necessary to cast it safely."

I hung my head. "I guessed as much. I only managed to hold the construct together because of how terrified I was of the consequences of failure. As for why I cast in the first place… well, I have imagined myself doing something like that almost my entire childhood. Except, the pride demon was significantly more terrifying than I imagined. That was my first experience of combat."

Solas spoke quietly. "Teldirthalen"

I raised an eyebrow at him.

"Reckless fool" he elaborated.

I grimaced but nodded. "Aye. That's about the size of it"

* * *

For the rest of that trip, I spent my days constructing spell forms in my head, only giving them enough power to stabilize, without actually having enough juice to work. I spent every spare moment practicing shields and basic offensive magic with Alexander and discussing magical theory with Solas. I also asked for him to help me begin learning staff combat. I needed to get over any squeamishness about pain quick. I was not disappointed. During that first training session he batted me around like child, leaving me battered and bruised before he healed me.

Then he did it again.

As I suspected would be the case, I sucked. **Hard**. But it was necessary, and besides; the staff was a useful casting aid. While I didn't have the same trouble channeling magic through just my body that regular mages did, it did take some of the mental exercise out of casting, leaving it easier for me to control my power. Instead of having to keep the directional elements of my spells in my head, I could just use the staff. As a big stick, it excelled at pointing at things. Go figure.

Plus, the basic lyrium inscriptions in the staff acted almost like a static, pre-formed, empty spell. Just push mana through the channels, et Viola! Elemental missile. That was what the basic staff damage "melee attack" from the game had been.

This helped me keep my mouth shut tremendously, since my head was absolutely bursting at the seams with ideas about how to use the lyrium to aid in the casting of more complex spells, or even something like magical programming or at least logic circuits. But that was a long way off. I needed a much better grasp of my limits, and to complete my plans with the knowledge spirit, before I could even consider trying anything on that scale.

Once the sun set, I got plenty of good opportunities to reconnect with my Eagle scout skill set, setting up campfires, trail cooking when we could manage it, and of course, telling stories around the fire. Varric was in his element, telling humorous stories about his time with Hawke et all. Alexander begged him to tell the story of how the man had ended up as "Waffles" but the stubborn dwarf insisted that particular tale deserved more gravitas than a mere campfire could provide.

After that, I would magic myself to sleep (Which was EXACTLY as useful an ability as I was hoping it would be, I always hated trying to fall asleep.)

That's when the real fun started.

During the night, I learned about the fade from Solas. He showed me some of the tricks he knew for finding old dreams, and more importantly, how to defend myself from demons. It actually wasn't as difficult as I was afraid it would be. One of my greatest strengths had always been self-awareness. I am no stranger to my own darker inclinations.

When Solas first tested me against a rage demon, it called forth all the anger that I had ever felt at those who had bullied me when I was a kid. So, I took its power away the same way the same way I had taken theirs. I laughed at it. Using a trick that I created that I had termed "Mental Judo", I restructured my thoughts and perspective, until the idea of a creature so twisted that it needed other people to throw a hissy fit to satisfy its own needs was hilarious. Its reaction to my mirth was to run away as if my laughter were stinging it like a cloud of aggressive bees. Which made me laugh harder.

The fear demon was a little more interesting. I'm not really afraid of that much (yet. I was fairly sure that would change after I'd seen combat). I was afraid of dark water when I was a boy, after I read a magazine article about tiny jellyfish whose sting caused agonizing pain. But I managed to get over that as I grew up. Honestly, I am terrified of death, but not because of pain. Because I fear oblivion. Its all very existential, and the sense that I got from the creature was that it was to weak and stupid to exploit a fear so…nebulous. A higher fear demon like the nightmare was likely old and powerful enough to use something like that against me, but the closest this thing could come to that was memories of how jumpy I used to get looking out the window at night, seeing only blackness since the lights were on in the house. I beat it by manipulating my dream to be back on the porch in my house at noon and sending him flying off the property by hitting him with my dad's golf clubs.

The desire demon was actually kind of a letdown. After all, most of my deepest desires involved being given magic powers and sent on a fantastic adventure to help people and fight evil.

Someone already beat her to that one.

I mean sure, she offered me MORE magic but it's not like I needed her help with that, either. I already had all the raw power I needed, and I knew that with time, I would figure out how to manipulate the magic system to my advantage. I've never played D&D as any class other than a wizard. All my favorite fantasy heroes were wizards. I spent most of my life daydreaming about what I'd do if I had magic.

I got this shit on lock.

The physical/sexual aspect of the desire demon was a little tougher, and it did hurt to see it try to flirt with me in the guise of my first crush. But I had learned to deal with that flavor of emotional pain a long time ago. As for the… _other _things she showed me (not going to tell you what _those_ were, thank you very much), well, let's just say that one of the advantages of being as cerebral as I am is that you spend so much time inside your own head, you learn how to think your way around the influence of your junk.

Then it morphed into my father and told me it was proud of me.

**That** pissed me off.

So, I hit it with the main gun battery of the Normandy SSR2 from Mass Effect, manifested out of my desire for it to **get the fuck out of my head!**

I wasn't sure whether Solas had seen any more evidence of my extra-theodosian origins from watching, as I had done my best to manipulate the dreams to only show relatively low-tech environments. Even the giant fuck off laser I used to blast the desire demon had come out of my hand, instead of manifesting the spaceship (which made using the attack a lot more difficult than it would have been otherwise). I could tell that I had impressed Solas with my easy handling of the demons. Still, he warned me not to get cocky, since he had deliberately tested me with demons weak enough that he could deal with them himself easily if I had failed. Still, I knew that didn't necessarily mean that the demons had been low powered. The dude knew more about the fade than most of the spirits that_ actually lived there_. A demon would have to be a pretty fucking big deal to pose any kind of threat to the literal big bad wolf. Not that he knew I knew that.

As dire as the situation was, I was honestly enjoying myself quite a lot. I had everything I ever wanted: good friends, magic powers, and a way to change the world for the better. Even better, for the first time in my entire life, I was on a regular sleep schedule! That was huge for me, for reasons I could probably go on for days about. Life was good. But in the back of my head, there was a voice whispering to me that, as high in the sky as I felt right now, the time was swiftly approaching when I would be brought crashing to the earth.


	11. The Battle-Mind

The first damper on my elation were the bodies. As we began to near our destination, the column began to encounter a few wrecked farmsteads, with no residents to be found but corpses. I tried to stay away from those, pretending to meditate in my tent during the brief grave-digging and mass funeral held for the poor souls. They were all very clearly either mages or templars who had fought to the death.

Finally, we were met on a hillside by the irrepressible scout Harding, who cheerfully introduced herself to the party, and Varric made the inevitable "Harding in Hightown" crack. I was barely listening. I focused my mana on my ears, straining to hear the sounds of the crossroads. If the riot from the game was going to break out, this time it wouldn't wait for us to get there. Sure enough, I heard a sound that was recognizable as steel clashing on steel from the direction of the village. I shouted,

"I hear fighting in the village!"

I took off running down the hill.

_What the hell am I doing running **towards**_ _the battle, **ahead**_ _of the fucking tanks? I'm a fucking squishy wizard for heaven's sake!_

Luckily for me, at that moment Cassandra barreled ahead of me, armor and all (god I'm out of shape). Behind her were the others, along with Harding, and a few of the soldiers. As the village came into sight, I could make out a large number of people in the village square shouting and moving. I channeled more mana into my eyes just in time to zoom in on the terrified face of a 17-ish looking girl in mages robes, just in time for a man in armor to cut her head off.

My body kept moving, but my mind was frozen on that face. She was just a fucking kid. And they cut her fucking head off. I was still struggling to process the death I had seen, the battlefield shifted. A similarly aged young man standing near the girl let out an anguished scream, and suddenly, I felt a turbulence in the Veil. I didn't have the time or focus to investigate it, but I quickly realized that I didn't need to. The man's eyes ignited into globes of crimson hellfire, his scream going on long past the capacity of human vocal chords as it deepened in pitch. His flesh turned a deep, blood red color as his back hunched over. Then, his body, (and its new driver) snapped upright bring its arm, now sporting vicious black claws, up **through** the templars neck! It finally stood at its new 7-foot height, holding the templar's head above him like a trophy. The entire scene had taken maybe 20 seconds. Me, several of the soldiers, one of the templars, and ALL of the villagers I could see all froze. The newly minted abomination crushed the severed head in its fist, and let out a guttural, inhuman roar.

"**VEEENGEAAAAAAANCE!**

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice said,

**_Let's see, 1 attack action by the templar, one special attack by the mage, then bonus action intimidation check with advantage. 2 turns, 20 seconds. I guess the turn length in D&D is pretty accurate._**

There was a brief moment of perfect stillness, and then another voice pierced through the silence, ringing with a different sort of power.

**FOR JUSTINIA! **Cassandra bellowed, and charged towards the abomination.

The soldiers hesitated a moment, then took up Cassandra's war cry, and charged after her.

I moved out of the way of the infantry charge and slowed to a halt. This was a full-scale battle, not a riot! The voices of panic, fear and confusion were clamoring in my mind, telling me to run. The existential terror I felt at the idea of me dying was lobbying heavily as well. Meanwhile, my internal fanboy was demanding that we instead pay close attention to the real-life monster smackdown match between Cassandra and the abomination. That voice was completely ignorant of possible harm, it just wanted to see cool shit. Still more voices were shouting at me that I should fight the people who were trying to murder terrified teenage civilians. The doubt screamed at those voices that I was just a nerdy college washout, and what the fuck could I do about a dozen trained mage killers in full plate armor.

The debate raged inside my skull, paralyzing me, and leaving me next to ignorant of the armed conflict that raged around me. But I retained enough awareness to realize that one of the templars had peeled off from the main group and was heading for me. I started to panic as our eyes met, and his face twisted into a rictus of hatred and disgust.

He wanted to kill me.

If I didn't stop him, he **would **kill me.

I was going to die.

And then the world around me seemed to crawl to a halt for a single moment.

As I looked at the man who would end my life, something woke up inside me. Something massive and primal that crashed through my thoughts with the force of a tsunami, silencing all the voices and perspectives in an instant. The only one able to withstand the onslaught was fear, but even that voice became a faint background noise in my head, fading in importance and volume.

The new voice had a single, simple thing to say. I had to survive. Everything else faded in importance compared to that simple directive. The past and the future became meaningless, and my mind quieted as irrelevant emotions were discarded, my body relaxed as unhelpful tension eased, and all that was left was a sort of detached calm as I processed dozens of potential strategies . It felt great, as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

It wasn't that I **_could_** do this. I **_had_** to do this. No other outcome was acceptable.

The seemingly frozen moment ended. The man was still a few yards away. Good. Even if I had my shit together, that did not magically make me good at close combat. I was a ranged fighter. Channeling through the staff, I sent a fireball at him. He casually smashed it out of the air with his shield. I followed up with a lightning bolt, curious if he would be more susceptible in his metal armor. No such luck. The bolt struck him, and he grimaced briefly in discomfort, but that seemed the extent of the damage.

_Magic resistance._ I noted. My mind instantly began racing through the hundreds of fantasy plots I'd read for similar foes, and strategies that had been successful against them.

The templar smirked at me.

"Pathetic. I've seen apprentices do better." He grinned. "Is that really the best you can do?" he asked.

I grinned at him in turn, and calmly stated: "No. It was the worst."

So saying, I reached out with my will, and ripped a cobblestone the size of my fist out of the road, and hurled it at him with as much speed and force as I could impart. Bypassing the more eldritch means at my disposal, I simply threw a rock at him. Really, REALLY hard.

Unfortunately, the templar managed to get his shield up in time to guard his head, which prevented my strike from pulverizing his skull. However, he paid a price for it, as his shield deformed, and his arm broke with an audible _SNAP _sound. The man roared in pain but remained standing. Snarling in rage, the templar charged me, crying out "FOR THE ORDER!". At any other time, in any other state of mind, the sight of a half mad killer bearing down on me with a sword would have crippled me with fear. But now, caught up in what I decided I would call my "Battle-mind", it was faintly amusing, given what was about to happen.

Ripping off Avatar: The Last Airbender, I cast my will into the earth at my feet and, with a stomp of my boot, forcibly shifted the earth and stone below me into a 4-foot-long spike of rock that erupted from the earth at degree 45° angle to the charging man, who then impaled himself on my makeshift spear.

"Ole!" I cried in triumph as I watched the life fade from my enemy's eyes.

In the back of my head, I knew that sight would probably haunt me for the rest of my life, much like all the fantasy epics had suggested, but right now I was so high on adrenaline I didn't care. Also, I was unprepared for just how energy intensive earth magic was. My head hurt and my eyes ached, but it didn't feel that much worse than staying up all night playing videogames. I could cope.

I scanned the battlefield around me for more opponents but found that the soldiers were mopping up the last of them. The only serious fight left was between Cassandra and the abomination. Solas was casting something, probably a buff of some sort, but Cassandra didn't look like she needed it. In my Sight, her sword blazed with silver fire unlike anything I had ever seen in the game. The argent fire burned at the abomination, whose aura was now a sludge like, reddish oil slick. As I watched, she took one of the demon's slashes on her shield, then darted inside its reach and plunged her blade into its chest. With another inhuman roar of rage, the abomination shriveled and died.

Still staring at the Seeker with my Sight, I saw something incredible. Cassandra's whole aura exploded out from her body in a blaze of the same argent energy that coated her sword. The light rapidly diminished the farther away it got from the Seeker, but in its wake, I could see glimmers of duller silver in the auras of the soldiers around her. Then the wave overtook me. It was very subtle. I am almost certain anyone who could not see it like I did would just have assumed it to just be the joy of victory, but it was something entirely different.

Faith.

_I knew it! Stupid! Game balance! Bullshit! There is NO WAY the Seekers have access to the Templar class abilities without ingesting lyrium, but nooooo the developers can't have one of the companions be a class not available to the player character. The Seeker's power comes from the faith spirits already possessing them! I always knew they stuck around after they broke tranquility. _

**_And they don't even know it… I honestly can't decide if that's funny or sad._**

Then Cassandra's voice cracked through the square like a whip.

"WHAT ARE YOU IDIOTS DOING JUST STANDING THERE! GET BACK TO THE CARAVAN AND GET SUPPLIES FOR THE WOUNDED AND THE ENCAMPMENT!

"YES, LADY SEEKER." The soldiers stammered. They gave quick salutes and ran back up the hill towards the wagons.

Meanwhile, I walked back through the square, being careful to avoid the bodies. I arrived just as Alexander did.

"What do we do now? Revered Mother Giselle was supposed to be in this area, but I don't see a chantry in the village. How are we going to find her? Asked the Herald.

Shrugging, I added my 2 cents, "Maybe we should just ask?" and without any further warning, I yelled as loud as I could

"PEOPLE OF THE HINTERLANDS, WE ARE THE INQUISITION. WE HAVE COME TO SEEK THE COUNCIL OF REVERED MOTHER GISELLE ON HOW BEST TO RETURN PEACE AND ORDER TO THESE LANDS. WE MEAN YOU NO HARM AND HAVE FOOD AND SUPPLIES TO TRADE.

My voice faded into the silence, and then the door to one of the houses opened, revealing an older man in templar armor. We all drew our weapons, but he called out,

"Peace! I am unarmed. If you are the Inquisition, then I will take you to the Revered Mother. She has a message for your 'Herald of Andraste'. "

Alexander stepped forward. "And I would very much like to hear it."

Stepping out of the doorway, I got a better look at the man. He looked to be in his late 60s, FAR older than the relatively young men who had just attacked us. His armor was well cared for, but it too showed the signs of age in its many scratches, scores, and dents. His hair and beard were pure white, which made him seem even older than he likely was. But for all of that, his should.

The newcomer sized up Alexander with a glance, then nodded to himself. His eyes then inspected the rest of our party. He bowed respectfully to Cassandra.

Seeker Pentaghast. It is an honor to meet you. Then his gaze fell on me, and his eyes widened.

"Felix? Is that you? What in Andraste's name are you doing here?"

I froze. He…recognized me? How the FUCK could he RECOGNIZE someone who didn't even exist last month?!

"Who? Wha… I don't know any Felix. My name is James Black."

The man sighed, "My apologies then, ser Black. I suppose these old eyes may be giving out on me. For a moment, I could have sworn you were Felix Amell…" his voice trailed off.

Alexander's jaw dropped. "How exactly are you on a first name basis with _The Hero of Fereldan_?"

I froze. Just who was this person? It was true that I had designed my Warden Commander to look like me, but the only 4 characters in this game that would have met him were Leliana, Cullen, Morrigan, and Loghain.

The old warrior collected himself and nodded to Alexander.

"My name is Greagoir. In answer to your question lord Herald, I know Felix because before King Alastair freed the Kinloch Hold from oversight, I was the Knight Commander of the Fereldan Circle of Magi.

* * *

So what did you guys think of my Very first action scene? It was a little clunky, but I am still happy with how it turned out.

stay healthy!  
Jokeslayer94.

P.S: When you read the last line in the chapter, I want you to imagine a DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN! sound effect.


	12. Greagoire

I just stared slack jawed at the white-haired man. Granted, I had never really paid attention to his appearance in DAO, (I was usually rearing to get into the tower and meet Wynne), but I remember he didn't have white hair.

"What-white-alive-conclave…." I sputtered under my breath.

"What… what are you doing here Knight Commander? I thought you would have gone to the conclave with Irving?" I asked him incredulously.

His eyes narrowed, and everyone else in the group turned to look at me.

"I'm sorry, do I know you?" he said darkly, his voice gaining a slight edge.

I coughed. "No, you don't. But I know you. The stories about the conclave mention a second player, yes? A Seer?" I hinted.

He looked puzzled for a moment.

"Well yes, but I had assumed that the herald and this "prophet of the maker" were the same person."

"Oh for the love of…" I sighed, putting my hand on my face, "They're not. I'm the seer, although I am _definitely_ no prophet. I'm just a regular mage with some of the teachings of the Rivaini seers. I was already on my way to Haven when the blast occurred. I wanted to use my insights to aid them. Please commander," I begged, "I beg you never repeat that ridiculous moniker again."

A round of chuckles came from the peanut gallery at my embarrassment.

His expression softened a bit, but the edge remained in his voice.

"That still doesn't explain how you know who I am, or Irving."

"The Sight doesn't exactly differentiate between the past and the future when it comes to momentous events. Just as I had visions about the trials of the inquisition, I had similar insights about the hero of Fereldan. I am familiar with the events of Uldred's Folly. However, that is where my knowledge of your path ends. I had assumed you and Irving both died at the conclave." I told him. I could almost feel the others' gazes on me as I made up more bullshit seer lore.

At that, his gaze fell.

"I have not been a part of the templar order since the King's decree. As such, I had no standing at the Conclave. Irving however….did." he said, his voice rough.

I hung my head. I had hoped that if Gregoire had survived, then Irving had as well. I had loved and respected the old sage, as much as you could a videogame character, and he would have been a magnificent asset for the Inquisition.

"I am sorry for your loss. Irving was a great man. The world is a darker place without him in it." I said.

He looked back up at me.

"Strange, to hear such words from someone who never met my friend. But I can hear the sincerity in your words. Thank you." He said.

Then I remembered something else from "Broken Circle".

"Oh right!" I exclaimed, snapping my fingers, "Speaking of that night, when we're done here in the Hinterlands, you should seriously consider returning with us to Haven. The commander of our forces would be overjoyed to see you again!"

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"Oh? And who exactly leads the inquisition's armies?" he inquired.

I smiled at him.

"Cullen Rutherford."

Gregoire's eyes widened.

"Rutherford?!" he exclaimed, a look that I thought might be relief on his face. "You have no idea how happy I am to hear that. I am pleased the boy landed on his feet. The last I heard from him, he'd resigned the order after that mess in Kirkwall." He nodded to himself. "I may just take you up on your invitation. It would be good to see the boy again."

At this, Cassandra broke her uncharacteristic silence and scowled at Gregoire.

"That _boy _is the supreme commander of the armies of the Inquisition."

At this, Gregoire actually let out a bark of laughter.

"So he is, Seeker! Let me take you to Revered Mother Giselle, so you can begin your work in these lands." A devious grin made its way onto the old warrior's face. "I would like to see the quality of the men Cullen has trained. Its been years since the last time I made him run laps around the tower in full armor!" he said smugly, as he started leading us to the west towards the revered mother's infirmary.

A wave of choked laughter erupted from every inquisition member in earshot… including Cassandra. I hadn't realized she knew how to do that!

Varric's jaw dropped, his eyes widened. He turned to Cassandra and asked incredulously,

"Alright, who are you, and what have you done with the right hand of the divine?!"

Cassandra turned to the dwarf, her smile melting into the more familiar scowl of annoyance, and she just growled at him.

Varric smirked. "Oh, my mistake. There she is. For a moment there I thought I was hearing things."

As we walked the short distance to the infirmary, I was surprised to find a smile on my face. I had just killed someone. I didn't exactly feel guilty about it, considering he'd been trying to kill me himself, but I thought I should be feeling… something. Like something significant had happened. But I didn't. I was completely ok with what had happened, and even pleased that I had proven to myself that I could keep my head in a real fight. I wasn't exactly sure what that said about me.

However, no good could come from dwelling on it. I was in a good mood. I didn't want to ruin it by trying to convince myself I was a monster.

Gregoire led Alexander and Cassandra to the mother, but I shied away from the meeting. I had no desire to repeat the "I'm not the prophet" speech with an actual clergywoman. Instead, I tried to fade into the background and watch the healers work with the injured.

It was fascinating stuff. The healer projected her aura into her patient through touch, using it to diagnose the patient's injuries. Then the aura would pool at the site of the injury and begin to heal the wound. I could tell from the Sight that it was more complicated than it looked. She was only allowing a small, tightly controlled amount of her mana into the patients. I remembered the near catastrophe with the plasma shot in the forest and shuddered. If I tried to do that, I'd probably pop him like a balloon.

_Come to think of it, maybe I could use that as an attack? It could be my last resort if someone manages to get close. It wouldn't take any finesse, just slap someone and shove an unsafe amount of raw magic into him. It might not work on another mage though…_

**_OH! OH! You would be like a monk! What was that overpowered high level attack? Quivering Palm? That was supposed to work by injecting Ki into the enemy's body and then controlling it to destroy them from the inside out! If that works, then maybe you could make the other class abilities work?_**

_It's a good thought, but I am still primarily a ranged fighter. I would prefer to avoid close quarters._

**_Doesn't mean you can't learn it anyway. Besides, staves counted as monk weapons, right? You're already doing that!_**

_Point. But I should at least wait until I am less embarrassingly bad at regular staff fighting._

"Hello? James? Are you in there?" Alexander's voice jolted me out of my musings. Beside him stood Revered Mother Giselle. She looked older than she did in the game. In person, the ridiculous pope hat/crown thing that was part of the formal robes of a revered mother looked uncomfortable. It was a little impressive that the thing didn't fall off. The rest of the robes looked more or less the same, except that they were a deeper shade of red than I remembered, and of course, all the metal decorations were real and were thus shinier.

I shook myself, then bowed slightly to the cleric.

"I'm sorry Alexander, Mother Giselle. I was observing the magic of the healers and got a little caught up in my head."

"That is alright, child." She said in her incredibly thick French accent. "There are far less pleasant things to watch in these lands."

Alexander grimaced but nodded. "That's certainly true. Anyways, Mother Gisselle has a plan to deal with the chantry's opposition. She is going to go with some of the refugees back to Haven to begin to work on it with the Nightingale."

I nodded back to him. Then I turned to Mother Giselle.

"Might I ask a favor of you, Revered Mother?" I asked.

"Of course, my Son."

"Will you do what you can to help Leliana stop this "Prophet of the Maker" nonsense? I am NOT savior material. Besides, it distracts from the "Herald of Andraste" over here. He is at the heart of this. I am merely another piece on the board." I said.

"Hey!" Alexander scowled at me, indignant. "I like helping people, but I'm not all that pleased to become a religious figure either!" he said.

I shrugged at him. "And yet, you are the one in whom our hopes rest. That mark is the only thing that can stop what is coming, and you are stuck with it. Its like I said when we first met. With great power comes great responsibility."

Mother Giselle was about to say something, but she was interrupted by Greagoire.

"I will be staying here for a few weeks to work with Corporal Vale and lead the few templars among your forces. I may not take the lyrium anymore, but I have led the men of the order for 30 years. Besides, while I do not like the direction the Order has moved in over the past year, most of the mages here are apprentices. They still need keepers. The abomination from earlier proves that, at least while we are in a warzone." He said resolutely.

I scowled but nodded. He was right. And even if he _was _wrong, after the rage abomination from the battle, some of the civilians would need the templars around just to feel safe.

Alexander nodded to the old soldier as well. "I agree completely agree, Knight-Captain, though if I might make a suggestion?" he asked.

Greagoire nodded for him to go on.

"I agree that apprentices need watching, but the other side of the Order's skillset is demon hunting. And ever since the Breach, demons have been a lot more common then anyone is entirely comfortable with. If any of the roving monsters find this village, you and your men will be our best defense. If you have any veteran demon-slayers in your ranks, I might even ask to borrow them to help me and my team close some of the more hazardous rifts."

Greagoire smiled at the young man.

"You've a good head on your shoulders lad. See to it that it stays right where it is. I have a feeling that there is a lot more to your fate then that mark on your hand."


	13. The Demon

**Chapter 12: The Demon**

That night, after a long day of helping corporal Vale's men and Alexander set up our encampment in the village of crossroads, I collapsed onto my bedroll, for once falling asleep almost instantly _without _consciously shifting into the fade.

* * *

I got up from my bedroll on the small hill above the shore of Lake Powel in Utah. I looked around curiously. I could the see bedrolls on the large flat rock where the others in my wilderness therapy group were supposed to be sleeping. But they were all empty…

_Something strange is going on here._

_**Never mind that! Its still dark out, but dawn is probably coming soon… You can watch the sunrise over the lake again!**_

Dismissing the empty bedrolls as trivial, I walked up to the ledge that overlooked the magnificent vista of the lake. I sat there looking over the waters for a time, waiting for the sun to peak up over the horizon. But the darkness refused to relent.

Slowly, a sense of unease began to creep over me, sinking its hooks deeper into me as the darkness seemed to deepen and grow. I was on a wide-open expanse of flat rock, with nothing to even cast any shadows, yet I could feel the night grasping out for me. My heart began racing in my chest, my mind screaming for me to flee this place. But when I tried to follow its advice, I found that I could not even move a muscle! The shadows had me in their grip, an icy cold spreading from their tendrils and permeating my flesh until I felt almost frozen solid.

While I struggled, the darkness closed in on me, devouring the landscape until I was floating in a formless black void. I don't know how long I drifted, struggling desperately to regain control of my limbs. After an eternity of that, my awareness was drawn back out of my head, to my surroundings, which were no longer a formless black.

I was in a large stone room. From the walls, eerie red flames burned soundlessly, casting a hellish light on the rest of the décor. I was kneeling on a long aisle of black carpet, at the foot of a dais on which was a massive slab of crystal in the shape of a throne. On that throne, sat Corypheus.

The abomination looked just like he did in the game. He was clad in a garment of rust colored rags that hung around him from where it was stitched to a pair of dark metal pauldrons that seemed fused to his sickly, greyish pink flesh. The skin of his chest was almost as ragged as his robe, revealing glimpses of his ribs, backlit against the red glow emanating from his chest cavity. His face was the worst. His skin seemed stretched tight over his skull, his expression frozen in an eternal sneer of hate and rage held in place by the jagged shards of red lyrium fused with his skin and bone.

The horrifying tableau jolted my mind out of its fearful stupor and into high gear. I was clearly in the Fade. I did not remember going there consciously, but then, this was the land of dreams. I must have gotten here the old-fashioned way. Wincing, I threw my will against the elder one's mental shackles, but my fetters did not budge in the slightest. Something was keeping me here!

I could think of several explanations for my current situation.

1: The being before me was some kind of demon.

2: It was actually Corypheus.

3: I had gone insane.

I honestly could not tell which possibility was worse.

Tired of the silence, maybe-Corypheus spoke. "I do not have cause to say this very often, you primitive, ignorant wretch, but I do believe I am in your debt."

I just stared at him in shock.

"Wha..What?!" I blurted out.

He smiled at me evilly. "You have all but secured my victory, otherworlder. With the secrets locked in that insignificant head of yours, I can now crush that pretender in his cradle, secure and strengthen my hold over the ignorant southlands, and ensure the resurrection of the Imperium! You even gave away the location of the Well!" He let peal of malicious laughter "You are an unwitting gift, mangling! A gift from an apologetic cosmos, for daring to create even one timeline where I am denied my DESTINY!" He crowed, bursting into a full-on evil villain laugh.

_At least he has a good voice for it… _ I noted with black humor, as the bottom fell out of my stomach.

Rendered speechless, I could only gape at the creature in horror. I had doomed them all! The events of the game would never take place if Corypheus had the same advantages over the Inquisition as I did over him and the Venatori! How had he even gotten the information out of my head? I knew it was probably possible, here in the mental realm, but I was sure the method would have to some form of psychic combat. I did not remember any such struggle, whether I lost it or not.

_Wait a minute…._

A flare of hope kindled in my chest, accompanied by more than a little desperation. With an effort of will, I forcibly wrest control of my mind back from the bottomless well of horror and shame caused by the monster in front of me and shoved it in a proverbial closet in the back of my mind. Momentarily free of the crushing emotions, I examined the being in front of me in as much detail as I could, searching for anything out of place.

At first, I did not see anything out of place. Ragged clothes? check. Copious amounts of red lyrium sticking out of his flesh? Check. Permanent scowl of hate etched into his face? Check. I couldn't see anything that leapt out at me as an inconsistency… and yet as I took in the sight of him, some instinct was nagging at me that there was something wrong with this picture.

_**Wait a minute… where is the orb?**_

My mind seized on the tiny inconsistency in desperation. Corypheus was a narcissistic psychopath with a god complex. He was absolutely obsessed with power. He would never let such a powerful magical tool be out of his possession. He certainly hadn't in the game. I could not remember a single scene out of the entire thing where he had appeared without the damn Macguffin.

Almost unbidden, a memory replayed itself in my mind.

_Lying on my couch at 1am, hands gripped tightly on the controller as a wall of fire fills the television screen. A silhouette appears, nothing more than a black outline backlit by the inferno. No distinct legs, just an inhumanly thin stalk leading up to a hulking upper body, with spindly arms that ended in exaggerated, claw like hands. It looked like the upper half of Sauron was growing out of a tree…_

_I lean forward in my seat. This is the big bad evil guy, the antagonist. My archnemesis. _

_As Corypheus emerges from the blaze and becomes visible, my mind races at the implications of the creature having red lyrium __**GROWING OUT OF HIS FUCKING FLESH. **__However,__another part of my mind was going over his character design. Red is my favorite color, so no complaints there. They really did a good job on the face... I can practically __**taste **__how much he hates everything. But I don't really like the…_

_**THAT STUPID IRON PYRAMID-HEAD LOOKIN THING STICKING OUT HIS CHEST!**_

Flashing back to (un)reality, I took in the scene with new eyes. The Corypheus in front of me was mostly the same as the canon one, but it had a few big differences. All of which I realized, I found more frightening than the original. This thing wasn't really Corypheus, he was **my mental picture **of Corypheus. Which meant…. I grimaced as the rest of the situation became clear to me.

"I didn't give you shit! You're just a jacked-up fear demon, aren't you?" I snarled.

The demon stopped bragging about all the horrible things I had "allowed him to do" and turned to face me. His form did not change, but his voice shifted from Corypheus' menacing baritone, to a high, breathy hissing sound, filled with sinister intent.

"Indeed I am, _Oracle_." It laughed, putting enough mocking contempt into the word "Oracle" that it literally hurt. This was the Fade after all.

Still chuckling, it continued. "You think you have changed anything? Just because I am not he, does not mean you have not brought death and destruction to everyone you love. I just have to take your fears, and the knowledge in them, and give them over to him myself. The Elder One will reward me handsomely, I am sure."

I laughed at the creature. "That means all I have to do is kill you! Not so hard to do now that I've seen through your two-bit charade!"

At this, it let out the loudest burst of vile laughter I'd heard so far.

"Oh! Oh, you think that was…" he gasped out, barely able to speak through his laughter. "You've seen through my… tricks? That was just the opening gambit, my naïve new friend. After all, the most enjoyable part of the hunt… is the **kill.**" It grinned at me with eyes that burned with wickedness. "We both know its not _Corypheus _you truly fear. Let us move on to the main course, shall we?"

Then, the thing's body started to shift. Its frame expanded and grew, morphing from the spindly, ragged form of Corypheus, into a tall but regularly proportioned human. His clothes changed from black rags into an elegant crimson colored silk robe embroidered with patterns of flames in gold thread. The robe was loose enough to hang off of the man's frame, hinting at the muscle beneath. He had long black hair that reached down to his shoulders, and a short beard. In his hand, he grasped a golden staff inlaid with runes that burned with red light. Mounted on its end was Solas' orb, also glowing red. Then he spoke, and his voice was far more terrifying than Corypheus'.

Because it was mine.

"After all," my (much better looking) doppelganger said, "That pathetic old relic could never be _half _as threatening to this world as _you _could be! That fossil couldn't do shit without help from stolen elven magic, an army of sycophantic zealots, an ocean of sacrificed blood, and an honest to god _**Get Out of Death Free**__**Card!**_ Even the wolf is merely chasing the past, trying desperately to recreate something that has been lost forever…" He ck sneered derisively. The longer he spoke, the less he sounded like demon, and the more he began to sound like… Me.

A wicked smile formed on my…

_**ITS! Formed on ITS FACE! NOT MINE!**_

Formed on _its _face as he continued his tirade. "**I **have more vision in my pinky finger than those old fucks have in their entire bodies! I am not chained to the past, **for I come from the future!**" He boomed. Laughing maniacally, wings of brilliant flame sprouted from his back and catapulting him into the air. His robes billowing out around him in exactly the way I had always wanted jacket to do on a windy day. He looked down on me, and screamed angrily,

"**THIS WORLD, AND EVERYTHING IN IT, BELONGS. TO. ME! I BOUGHT IT AT GAMESTOP FOR 60$, AND I WILL HAVE WHAT IS MIIIIINE!"**

As my evil twin hovered above me, cackling in insane glee, I could only gape in horror. I could feel the demon's influence drowning my mind, whittling away at my psyche as it feasted my fear and despair caused by this abomination crafted from a twisted combination of my deepest fears, insecurities…and desires.

Don't look at me like that… I'm not a saint. And if you ignored the egomaniacal ranting, my doppelganger looked **fucking cool as hell**.

I could feel myself dying…_being eaten, _by the beautiful abomination before me. But I was too stunned to think, let alone break free. Still, I tried. I fought against the demon's influence for as long as I could, but I only managed to prolong my torment.

_This is it… _ I sobbed inside my mind. _I fucked it up. Just like I fucked up everything else. Only this time, it won't just be me suffering the consequences… Felix… Garret…Alexander…I'm so sorry…_

Then, something strange happened.

The psychic straw the demon was using to feed on my fears was vaporized in a flash of actinic white power. For a moment, the everything seemed to freeze, as my senses registered that a new entity had invited itself to the demon's little party.

_What the fuck is that?…_

The being in front of me was unlike any other spirit or demon I had ever heard of. It registered to my sight as a chaotic, vaguely humanoid shaped cloud of emotions and voices. Its presence was not exactly painful, but it was…difficult to tolerate. Unlike most of the spirits I had ever encountered, this, whatever it was, did not seem to have a coherent identity or singular purpose. Inside the roiling cloud of emotion, I could sense flashes of dozens of different emotions, intentions and….memories?

Then the frozen moment ended. The next sound I heard was a roar of rage from the fear demon.

**You pathetic, flesh-loving, unformed FRAGMENT! You are not even done forming yet, AND YOU THINK YOURSELF ABLE TO INTERFERE WITH ****MY**** HUNT! HOW DARE YOU! **

The doppelganger shape the demon wore dissolved together into a nightmare of roaring flames, sharp claws, and black eyes. Letting out another earsplitting roar, it rocketed through the air towards me and the newcomer like a comet made out of hate.

However, the strange white spirit was not paying attention to the demon. Instead, it turned to me and reached out a hand, and poked me on the forehead. Instantly, a searing pain surged through my mind, along with…words? Whatever it was, it was trying to give me a message. But, like the creature, the message was chaotic and hard to understand. I heard/felt hundreds of voices try to say hundreds of different messages, all of which interrupted and overlapped each other, and were then forgotten. It was incredibly painful, but as it slowly disappeared, I noted with shock that I actually felt pretty good somehow. As the cacophony of voices quieted, the very last one managed to get out an actually complete sentence.

"_**Fear is a choice warrior. It can be refused. Now stand, warrior. Stand and FIGHT!"**_

Along with the message and the pain, the message also contained a gift of power, something like the Fade equivalent of a shot of adrenaline.

As the last echoes of the message faded, I stood up, my shackles both mentally and physically erased. My mind was free of fear, and my composure was restored to me. Without the looming specter of terror in my thoughts, the demon's power over me was broken. It only took a moment for me to come up with a plan of attack.

While I was taking my medicine, the demon had crashed headfirst into a barrier of white power coming from my new friend, which was clearly struggling to hold off the creature's wrath.

A smile found its way onto my face, and I put my hand on the mysterious newcomer.

"I don't know what you are, friend, but you saved my life. Take a load off. Its my turn now." I told it.

Still smiling, I held out my other hand, and began a mental exercise I had invented as a teenager to cheer me up when I got really depressed. My instincts were telling me that doing it here in the Fade would have significantly more explosive consequences.

I closed my eyes and thought of my family. In my mind's eye I pictured each and every one of them, imagining our relationships as unbreakable bonds that connected us to each other regardless of distance. At the speed of thought, I reached across creation with my mind, creating new connections to my friends, my teachers, my mentors. Everyone who had ever believed in me.

I took a deep breath and pictured each of the bonds sending me love and comfort, from all the way across creation. Even here, I knew that they would always be with me, if only I knew where to find them. I took all that love, belief, hope and other assorted positive energies and coalesced them into a ball floating over my hand.

When I opened my eyes, a miniature sun floated above my outstretched palm. It shined with an intensity that should have hurt my eyes, but somehow didn't. The light washed away the remaining fear in my soul, leaving in its place a feeling of calm serenity. The fiery comet that had been the demon was gone.

Instead, kneeling in front of me was a formless mass of shadows, with two beady red eyes. The light from my little ball of sunshine burned away at him wherever it touched, erasing him in almost the same way he had sought to eat me. I don't _think _that was intentional, but I've always enjoyed irony, so I can't be sure.

I stared at the deteriorating wreck that used to be the fear demon. "You know, I came up with this after seeing that Dragon Ball Z movie, the one where Goku creates the spirit bomb, and then absorbs it for a power-up. The next step in the exercise is to do likewise and metaphorically "absorb" all the positive emotions to try to help me out of whatever pit of despair and self pity I'd sank into. But I actually feel pretty good already. I guess I have to find another use for all this power…." I said, looking the creature in the eye.

Snarling in hatred, the demon lifted its head and spat a glob of darkness at me, which promptly burned up in the light before it had even traveled a foot. "It doesn't matter what you do to me. No matter how many demons you can kill, your greatest fear will always be as close as the nearest mirror. You bring ruin to all that you love. It is your destiny." It rasped in its discordant voice.

I just shook my head at the corrupted spirit. "May you return to your original purpose in your next incarnation." I told it sadly. Then, I blew on my hand, as if scattering a pile of dust. The little ball of sunshine fractured at my breath, roaring out of my hand into a column of flame as dense as the breath of a Great Dragon. When the flames finally spent themselves, no trace of the demon had survived, not even ash. All my energy now spent, my legs gave out from under me, and I sank to the floor, an entirely different kind of darkness rushing up to devour me whole.

* * *

When I opened my eyes again, I was back in my tent, staring up into the green eyes of a certain bald ex-god. Upon noticing that I was awake, he gazed at me solemnly.

"We need to talk, da'len."


	14. Wolf baiting, and other great ideas

"We need to talk, da'len."

With only those 5 words, the bottom dropped out of my stomach. How much had he seen? Had I done something terrible without realizing it? Had the demon managed to send some of my secrets on to Corypheus before it died?

My worries danced about behind my eyes, consuming me so utterly that I simply sat there staring, until Solas actually reached out and snapped his fingers in front of my face.

"Focus child! This weakness of mind is exactly why you keep getting in these situations!" he chided me harshly.

My shoulders sagged, and a familiar flame of self-loathing and depression kindled in my thoughts. But I had long since learned how to cope with things like that, so I took a deep breath and nodded at him. "Very well, Hahren."

He glared at me. "Not here. Follow me." He said, then walked out of my tent. I scrambled into my clothes, threw on the leather vest/robe thing that was the closest I had to armor, and went to follow him.

Solas did not speak as he led me through the rapidly transforming village of Crossroads. In the field between the lake and the village rows of tents hosted our soldiers. Over by one of the buildings, I could see a man with an axe forming the ends of logs into sharp points, which were then put into a pile being emptied as soldiers took the spikes and hammered them into the ground around the village, forming a primitive fortification. On the other side of the road from the military encampment, I could hear the cacophony of clashing metal armor and wooden practice weapons, punctuated by the occasional harsh bark of a drill sergeant. Curious, I ran my eyes back over all of these sights again with my mage's sight. What I saw was pretty impressive, even if I didn't understand enough about my new senses to understand half of it. Everywhere I looked, I could see people's auras brightening with flashes of vivid colors. I could even see some of the colors clinging to the buildings. The training field where the recruits drilled also blazed with occasional flashes of other colors, although those were overwhelmed by all the auras on the field dominated by a glittering sheen the color of stainless steel. I was so busy gawking at the scenery, I walked straight into Solas when he suddenly stopped moving.

"Oh shit… I'm sorry Solas!" I apologized profusely, but Solas just looked at me sternly, then opened the flap on his own tent and walked inside muttering to himself angrily in Elvish. I followed him inside, keeping the amusement off my face as "Son, I am Disappoint" memes flew through my mind. He motioned for me to close the flap behind me, and as I did, nearly all noise from the village outside died away, leaving only silence.

He gestured for me to sit down on a small fur rug off to the side of his bedroll, which looked to be made from an entire bear pelt. I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off.

"Ever since you fell out of the sky, you have been an enigma, da'len. Your visions of the future are impossibly accurate. Your magical potential is immense, and your instinctual grasp of the fade is nearly unheard of in this age. In the time I have known you, you have shown great intelligence, rapidly adapted to unfamiliar circumstances, and proven yourself to be a responsible custodian of the knowledge you possess of the future." His voice deepened, taking on a menacing edge. "In that same time, you have also made a **series **of reckless decisions with your magic, and performed multiple ill-considered "experiments" whose results nearly killed you and everyone around you, which I don't need to remind you, would upgrade the consequences to cataclysmic, given exactly **who **you surround yourself with. You treat you magic like a toy and have NO respect for the forces you ignorantly meddle with like a clueless child!" By the end of his tirade, he nearly seethed with anger, breathing heavily despite the fact that he had not raised his voice above a conversational tone the whole time he had been dressing me down like a shamefaced 2nd grader called to the principal's office.

My face fell, shoulders sagging as I sat and listened. When he finished, silence fell inside the tent, but not inside my head.

_You could go far if you would just apply yourself, James._

_You never **think** before you act!_

_Maybe your grades would improve, if you would actually study instead of playing videogames all goddamn day!_

_Its always about instant gratification with you! You'll never get anywhere in this world if you can't learn to do what you need to do instead of just what you WANT to do!_

On and on and on. I'll spare you the full replay, or we'd be here for a month. Sufficed to say it did not leave me feeling very good.

Solas calmed himself and spoke again, this time with a sigh of disappointment that was as much for himself as me. "However, I do bear some measure of responsibility for these incidents. Especially this last one."

His words should have inspired anger, but my mood was so morose and numb that all I felt was surprise. "What do you mean, Solas? You knew I would be almost eaten by a fear demon?" I asked him.

He nodded. "You have used your dreamer abilities to fade walk every night since we met. It was clear you did not understand how dangerous that is. Just because the fade is the realm of dreams, that does not mean that it is the realm of **sleep**. What few realize, is that a dreamer's transition or a mage's lyrium assisted journey have a few key differences from visiting it naturally in your dreams."

I stared blankly at him, confused. "Such as?"

He continued. "One's physical body is an enormously complicated construct. One's mind is even more so. The entity formed from both, a living person, is an entity whose inner workings are nearly incomprehensible. Therefore, it is generally not a good idea to interfere with its mechanisms. When you transition directly into the fade without properly falling asleep, your body receives the rest it needs, but the mind" he stared pointedly at me, "Does not."

I leaned back in surprise, my mind running down all the possible consequences of that detail. We didn't even properly understand the mechanics of sleep on Earth, and people there were almost to the point of being able to create _artificial intelligence_. Hell, I came to this world through a door inside a lucid dream, which was itself the culmination of my research into lucid dreaming. Because of all that research, I thought I could understand what that information meant.

The sleep cycle was the process of alternating between slow wave sleep and rapid-eye-movement sleep. Although most people (myself included) tend to focus more on REM sleep, since that is when dreams happen, the other one was just as important. I never really understood half the crap I read on the internet about the sleep cycle. I didn't have a fucking doctorate in neuroscience. However, I do remember that the studies that linked disfunctions in the sleep cycle to extreme mental illness had some pretty high numbers.

Fuck. I should have known being able to magic myself to sleep was too good to be true.

I heard a loud throat clearing "**a-hem**" from Solas and jerked my head up in time to see Solas roll his eyes at me.

"I don't know whether I should be surprised that my words mean anything to you, or irritated that you have the power of a dreamer despite the fact that you _clearly _do not need a connection to the fade to depart the physical plane for the mental." He said dryly.

I gestured for him to give me a minute and closed my eyes. Focusing, I replayed the past 2 weeks in my head. In the beginning, the only abnormalities in my behavior were directly the result of **being transported to another planet.** They were understandable. As was my near obsession with learning about and testing the powers I have wanted since before 1st grade. However, others were a bit less tolerable. That crack about Kinloch Hold at the council meeting. Trying to fucking compress thermal energy into PLASMA _without _talking to anyone who knew what the hell they were doing first. _Running headfirst into my very first fight to the death IN FRONT OF THE TANKS, instead of BEHIND THEM? _"Low impulse control. Decreased self-discipline. Lack of forethought…consequences….." My eyes widened.

"You… You manipulated me! You wanted to see what I would do with my guard down! You aren't just responsible for last night, but all of them!"

He stared at me coolly. "I am not responsible for your actions. I did not MAKE you do any of it. I didn't even force you to manually visit the fade every night instead of falling asleep the normal way."

I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. " Nevertheless, I did allow you to unknowingly impair your own judgement, without intervening. I am not without fault in this. I am impressed you figured it out though. It takes a very special kind of perspective to view your own actions with such objectivity."

I sat quietly, processing this newest revelation. We were both right, of course. I was the author of my own choices, as I always had been, but Solas had definitely steered them for his own observations. Although, given just how much some of the incidents had surprised and angered the man, I suspected he might regret his actions more than a little. Regretful or not, he had definitely manipulated me. I had allowed my meta knowledge blind me to the fact that Fen'harel was more than an unrivaled mage and brooding tragic backstory dude. He was the trickster.

I knew that I should probably be angry at Solas. That was the rational reaction to what he had done, and what the protagonists in my books would have done. But I just did not have it in me. This subtle act of social engineering, completely separate from anything like what happened in the game, threw me off even more than meeting knight captain Greagoire. It finally drove home the point that this world was a real, living, breathing place. Finally, I had an experience here in Thedas that felt familiar to me…

Social shit flying _waaaaay _over my head. The fact that Solas did it intentionally actually made me feel **better**, since it meant I hadn't done it to myself!

Slowly at first, I began to laugh. What started as a soft chuckle quickly deepened into a full bellied guffaw. I laughed until my jaw hurt. I had been tricked by an _actual trickster god! _That was SO FUCKING COOL! Furthermore, **I**, the clueless, autistic, awkward, self-proclaimed "Cave-Troll", had thought I could hide from him! That was hilarious! I laughed at myself, at my situation, at my company. By the time I started to tear up from laughing so hard, Solas gave me a death glare so cold it probably could have frozen water. Of course, in the throes of my amusement, it just bounced right off me, and almost set me off again. But I knew this discussion wasn't done yet, and at least a small part of me was still aware of how dangerous pissing Solas off could be for me. So, I tried to reign myself in.

"Peace, Solas!" I gasped, holding my hand out. "I'm not laughing at you… just… I thought I could… and you…!" I snorted, but finally managed to quiet myself. With an absolutely shit eating grin on my face, I looked Solas in eye.

"Solas, ma falon… I think it is time I made my final reckless and ill-considered decision on this bender of mine." He visibly paled, but I plowed onward. "I have to accelerate my timetable. I still can't believe I thought I could hide it from you for any extended length of time." I told him, shaking my head with a smirk. "I had always intended to tell you eventually, and Alexander. Probably the whole inner circle before long. But I was giving myself until Skyhold to learn about my magic and become skilled enough to defend myself, or at least until I had attempted my most ambitious plan. But for all my schemes, I forgot that I am about as socially aware as a box of rocks!" I said, bursting out in a fit of renewed chuckles. "Oh, I could bullshit my way past the suspicions of Alexander and the others long enough, I'm sure, but you! You know far too much to not see right through me!"

As I monologued, Solas' face shifted through many and varied emotions, most of which I could only guess at, but I knew his final expression painfully well. Irritation. When the elf next opened his mouth, his words _dripped _with exasperation. "Fenedhis, da'len. Will you stop weaving your words and just get to the point? I have little patience for your prevarications."

I snickered. "Awwww… but Solas! It's just so much fun!" I felt my grin widen as I quoted Butcher, "It's like Cocaine for wizards!" I would have burst into another laughing fit if my jaw and chest wasn't still laughing from the last one. I'd never imagined I'd get to use _that _quote on someone. "Besides, I'm just enjoying the irony of being able to pull this crap on **you**, of all people! I mean" I stared at him, my smile turning sly, "I bet you were the first person on this whole weird planet to use that particular technique, back in Arlathan, weren't you… **_Fen'Harel._**_"_

This particular revelation proved too much for the old elf. His eyes widened in shock briefly, but then his features took on a much more sinister mien. I only had time to think "_Well…shit."_ before solas' eyes flashed green and everything went black.

* * *

Sorry for the delay. Im caught between the twin inconvenience of writers block and IRL issues. But I remain committed to this story. I'm also still looking for a beta reader if anyone is interested.


	15. Peace Talks

**Chapter 14: Peace Talks**

I awoke to the sound of growling. I groggily eyed the room around me, noting with some alarm that I was in a cell. Then I saw the thing watching me from the other side of the bars.

Throughout Inquisition, the dread wolf is depicted in one of two ways. The first is simply an idealized canine form. The second was as vaguely canine shaped amorphous mass of darkness with 3 eyes. What stood before me was clearly the inspiration for both. On the other side of the bars stood a wolf larger than a Great Dane. The flickering light cast from the flames on the walls created dancing shadows along its pitch black fur, making it seem as though the creature was made of a mass of writhing shadowy snakes. I could only discern its jaws against the blackness of its fur because an eerie yellow light welled up from its throat, backlighting the gleaming expanse of sharp teeth in its gaping maw. Above the jaw, two matching pairs of three glowing yellow eyes all glared at me.

I went stock still. Recalling the conversation in the tent, I realized I must be in the fade. Very slowly, I began to relax. This was Solas' domain. The heart of his influence. If he wanted me dead, I would never have woken up. Gathering my nerve, I took a deep breath, and channeled Harry Dresden.

"Hiya, big bad wolf! Hows tricks?"

Yet another threatening growl, this one so deep I could feel it in my bones. It opened its maw and spoke in bestial gravelly baritone.

"_**You think this is funny, mortal?!"**_

"Well, not to you. I think its more cool than funny, but I've convinced myself its funny to cope with my fear, I think laughter is a verypowerfultoolheyisthisskyholdorthemountainsanctum…." I trailed off when I realized I was babbling. I took another breath and added, "Wow, Solas, that form really is quite intimidating. Did you come by the extra eyes honestly somehow, or did you change it to make it scarier?

"_**I am the one asking the questions here, shemlen. I suggest you answer truthfully if you value your life!" **_he snarled.

I rolled my eyes at the ancient being. "Solas, I am sufficiently impressed by the show of force, but could you drop the two-bit demon impression? Even if I didn't already know what was going on, a demon would have tried to eat me by now. Besides, we're only doing this now because I confessed to you that already know who you are. I'm not your enemy, dude."

The wolf stared silently at me for a long moment. Then he threw his head back and let out a guttural panting, chuffing sound that it took me a moment to understand was laughter. Suddenly, his form seemed to merge partially with the shadows, writhing and shifting and changing, until Solas stood before me once more. But this was not the wise hermit apostate that aided the inquisition. This was the Dread Wolf. He wore a half-plate very similar to the one he wore at the end of Trespasser, except he had a cloak that seemed to be made from the pelt of his other form, with a hood shaped like a wolf's head that had two eyes on either side of the snout. Inside the hood, his own eyes glowed green to complete the six eyed image.

My eyes widened and I leaned forward. "HOOLY SHIT THAT LOOKS SO FUCKING AWESOME! That get up is way cooler than that weird getup you had in Trespasser!"

"Da'len, please take this seriously! If you know who I am, then you must realize that here, in the heart of my power, I could kill you with a mere thought? I am, after all, a god." He said, letting out an exasperated sigh.

I stared at him blankly for a moment then burst out laughing again. "God Solas, It's gotta be KILLING you to lean into the Dalish "Great destroyer" schtick… We both know the only people who really needed to consider you "The Boogeyman" have been locked up for thousands of years!" I said, still giggling.

This proved to be the last straw for Solas. "I know you are an intelligent man James, but you have the strangest blind spots. Did you really fail to consider the implications of REPEATEDLY laughing in the face of a man named **Pride?!**" he snarled, voice rising into a yell. Then he squeezed his right hand dramatically into a fist.

Instantly, his will fell over me like a blanket, trapping me in place like a fly in amber. I couldn't even breathe, and even though I didn't actually _need _to do that in the fade, it was still veeeery unsettling.

"Now. I must know how you so much, and I have run out of patience for your diversions and mind games. I did not want to do this da'len, but you have forced my hand." He snapped. Then, he blurred forward faster than the eye could track and grabbed my head in his hand and began his assault.

Instantly, I could feel the tendrils of his awareness enter my thoughts. I found myself agreeing with what Solas had mentioned back at haven when he warned me about spell miscasts. While channeling mana through your thoughts is strange, the feeling was 100 times worse when the presence did not belong. The feeling is almost impossible to describe since it is purely mental. The closest I can come is that it was like a combination of a headache, the dizzy feeling you get when you stand up after lying down for a long time, and both the sound of, and tactile feeling of nails on a chalkboard. It was not pleasant. I could feel the tendrils of alien will directing my train of thought, memories flying through my head at _his _direction, instead of mine.

I'm not really sure how much he was able to find in there. I know he started with my memories of him, but almost immediately he got sidetracked by the concept of a videogame, which led him down the rabbit hole of all the various different stories and media I'd consumed in my 25 years of life.

Instead of just getting my memories of my life, Solas got a Wikipedia recap of the Dragon Age franchise which derailed into glimpses at dozens of different fictional worlds, dozens of made up magic systems and hundreds of different characters. After a while, I could feel Solas' will loosen its grip in the throes of stunned confusion at the chaos he'd discovered. I took advantage of this momentary lapse to throw him out.

When I came to, Solas was kneeling on the ground in my cell, clutching his head as if he had a migraine. I heard a pained grunting noise come from him, and I backed off slowly as he shook off his discomfort and began to stand. His gaze rose with him, until it caught once again on me.

"What in the names of the creators even are you, shemlen?" he panted, eyes full of awe, curiosity….and fear.

I sighed in disappointment. The impromptu mental battle had knocked me out of me "everything is funny now" mentality and back to the real world. This was not how I had imagined the conversation playing out. I had to actually begin a dialogue with the old wolf, or he would just get fed up with my BS and kill me. "I'm deeply sorry for my disrespectful attitude Solas. Ever since I came to this world, the sheer novelty of all this stuff," I said, gesturing to the fade around me, "Has almost done more to remove my inhibitions than your little deception with the thing about non-REM sleep. Is there somewhere comfortable where we could simply talk to one another, without any of the pageantry? On either of our sides?" I asked him.

"I…yes. I think that would be wise. There is much we must discuss." He said tiredly.

Solas led me through the halls of the not-sanctuary until we reached a sitting room with several comfy chairs and shelves full of books. He motioned for me to sit. I took a second to order my thoughts, then began. "There is something I would like to know before I begin my story: How did the first humans come to be on Thedas?"

Solas sat quietly for a long moment, then let out a deep breath. "Then I was right. The breach didn't bring you here from elsewhere on Thedas, did it?" he asked.

I arched an eyebrow at the ancient. "It did not." I agreed. "But that does not answer my question. I know that you are as jealous of your secrets as I am of my origins, but I would appreciate it if you could tell me anything you know of how I got here."

Now it was Solas' turn to raise an eyebrow at me. "You don't already know?" he challenged.

I gave him an exasperated glance. "I suppose I deserve that," I admitted, "But no. My knowledge of this world extends to the common knowledge of the modern age, and the specific details of the 5th blight, the unrest in Kirkwall that sparked the mage rebellion, and the inquisition. I know about Fen'Harel because you eventually tell the inquisitor."

Solas took this all in for a moment, then nodded. "I will answer your question with a question. How much exactly, do you know about Arlathan?"

That certainly wasn't an answer to my question, but it was a far better reply than we had managed in our last round of "discussions".

"Alright," I grinned, "If you wanna do this dance, I'm game. let's see. I know a lot of important events, but I don't have any kind of timeline for the order they occurred in.

I know about the existence of titans and Great Dragons, though I don't really know much ABOUT them. I know that Mythal killed one, though I only have suspicions as to why. I know that Arlathan fought a great war, though Im not sure who against. It was either the titans or the forgotten ones. I know that after the war the Evanuris in your own words "became generals, then kings, then gods." They became tyrannical dictators who created the Vallaslin to bind their servants. I'm not really sure when you were born on this timeline, though I know you had some sort of relationship with Mythal, and that you considered to be the kindest of the Evanuris. At some point you were either freed from Vallaslin by Mythal, you figured out how to remove them yourself, or just couldn't stand watching the enslavement of your people. You started a covert rebellion, and when the Evanuris started calling you the Dread Wolf you ran with it.

At some point, presumably because of her disapproval of the actions of the pantheon, the Evanuris murdered Mythal. After that, without her to reign them in, you said that they would've destroyed the entire world if you hadn't stopped them, so you used your orb to imprison them in the fade somewhere, and put up the veil, which caused Elvhen civilization to virtually disappear overnight without magic to power all your stuff. Then you took a nap for a couple thousand years, woke up too weak in some unspecified way to turn on your macGuffin, so you sent out a couple of lieutenants to lead the first psychotic you met with enough juice to hit the on button to the thing, assuming that the resulting explosion would kill him. Unfortunately for you, he is as far as I can understand, a lich. So it killed him just fine….until he got better."

By the end of my recitation, I could see Solas' knuckles were white with strain, and I could tell that it was taking a lot more effort to maintain his calm façade.

"You are correct. Some of the events are out of order, and you lack a great deal of context on many things. But all of that is essentially accurate." He said in a quiet voice devoid of any emotion. He sat unmoving for almost a full minute. In an unsarcastically intelligent move on my part, I remained silent and let him process. Slowly, his grip on the chair loosened, though his neutral mask remained. "I appreciate your candor, James. In the spirit of balanced scales, and because I am genuinely curious as to your thoughts, I will give you an equally complete answer.

"During the Great War, which was with the titans, there was a constant need for manpower and weapons. As each side developed their arsenals, a kind of bloody stalemate began to emerge. The power of the titans and their children increased exponentially the farther our forces penetrated into their domain in the depths of the earth. Conversely, the farther onto the surface the durgen'len went, the harder it became for the titans to channel enough power into the durgen'len to breach our defenses and spellcraft. As the bloody conflict raged and the Evanuris grew in influence, they searched the land for anything to use as an advantage. Eventually, they found something.

It was some sort of hole in the very fabric of existence. On the other side of the portal lay an untouched land, peopled by primitive beasts and little else. At first, the Evanuris were obsessed with this place, convinced that its untapped resources and unknown mysteries held the key to our victory. That lasted until first time Elgar'nan journeyed through the gap himself and discovered, to his horror, that the mystical energy that was the key to both our eternal lives, and our mastery of magic, barely existed in that place."

Solas stopped his narrative to visibly shudder in discomfort, then continued. "After that, Elgar'nan abandoned the gate in disgust, as did most of the other Evanuris. All except two. Dirthamen, because he would never abandon the chance to gain knowledge of any sort, and June, who stayed to study the structure and workings of the portal itself, to help him construct his works.

Dirthamen studied both the portal and the land beyond in as much detail as he could. He brought through hundreds of native plants and animals, even gifting some of them to the other members of the pantheon. The first humans were among these specimens. He had hoped to use them as soldiers in the war, as they were easily controlled and bred very quickly. However, the early shemlen, while physically stronger than the elvhen, were still not as mighty as the durgen'len, or intelligent enough to use tactics to negate that disadvantage. So he abandoned the project. Along with its subjects."

I listened with rapt attention to Solas' tale. It didn't answer many questions about Thedas, but it did give me a few promising theories about the relationship between Thedas and earth. I smiled at Solas. "Thank you for you candor in return, Solas." Then my smile faded. "Where exactly do we go from here? While I'm fairly certain neither of us is finished with this conversation, back on Thedas its mid-morning, and we are presumably passed out in your tent…"

Solas scowled then nodded. "Though we still have some time, you are right. Very well. We will go back now, and I will show you how to ward the village. Afterward, I will tell the Seeker and the knight-captain that I am going to show you how to reinforce the wards on the other side of the veil. That should give us the afternoon. I will reach out to Wisdom and a few of my other acquaintances. They will ensure that there is no repeat of our…miscommunications."

I gave Solas an enthusiastic thumbs up. "That would be absolutely fantastic." I told him. We shook on it, before both of us pulled on our astral tethers, sending us plummeting through the veil and back to our material bodies.

* * *

Thank you all for your views and Kudos. Even if I still feel vastly inadequate next to the likes of Virtually Faded, Half-life of Element Zero, Ad infinitum, or A Whole New World, (All of which are stories with the same premise published on )I still recognize that the 5000 odd views I have reached between AO3 and is nothing to sneeze at. My search for a beta reader is still ongoing. I am aware my writing style is a bit cluttered and overly cerebral, so I would really like a second opinion to bounce scenes off of. I think it would really help me grow as an author. Until then, I will continue to reveal to you the wacky misadventures of James Black in the Land of Thedas.

Stay Healthy,

Jokeslayer94


	16. Lets try this again

**Peace Talks, Take 2: Lets try this again**

Without looking away from the web of magic he was weaving in the empty air, Solas let out another of his exasperated sighs. "Since you seem to have the attention of a toddler distracted by bright colors, da'len, then that is precisely what we will focus on for the remainder of the morning."

Solas had been leading me around the village of Crossroads setting up wards, but I was too inexperienced to understand half of what he said, and too impatient to get back to our conversation to try to learn. I shot him a dirty look, but did not retort. He was not wrong, after all. "I'm not sure I follow, hahren. What are you saying?"

"I mean, **da'len**, that I will distract you with pretty lights." He snickered. "Tell me James, what do you see when you look to the village?"

Curiously, I turned to look at the now bustling town… and snorted with laughter. I'd had my Sight on all morning to try to watch Solas put up the wards, so when I looked at Crossroads, I saw exactly what Solas had said. A shining riot of pretty colors.

"Oh, that's good!" I guffawed. "Pretty colors. Ha! Nice one Solas!"

"There is a reason that one of my sobriquets is "the trickster" James. I am something of an authority on these things." He said with almost palpable smugness.

"So you're going to teach me how to interpret the Sight, Hahren? That does sound pretty diverting, actually." I admitted.

"As I told you in Haven, the Beyond can be perceived with any of the senses, or even none of them. Sight is simply the easiest to perceive and understand. For example, look to the training field." He said. I obeyed. "They most likely appear to you to be awash in differing brightnesses of grey, mixed with some reds, do they not?" He asked.

I raised my eyebrows. "You can't see it from there, how did you know?!" I demanded.

"Child, I do not need my **eyes **to attune myself to the Fade. The currents of emotion in the Beyond are an open book to me. Even if they were not, almost every military training facility I have ever seen has looked like that. It isn't hard to guess. Camps like that are saturated in the particular flavor of discipline needed by soldiers. They are also places of anger, helplessness, loyalty, duty, fear and excitement in varying quantities. Each of those emotional resonances are translated by your subconscious into colors for ease of understanding by your eyes. Technically, everyone perceives different colors based on their personalities, but in practice, there are some common threads. Military discipline is usually some shade of grey resembling steel, and at least ONE of the other emotions I mentioned is usually some shade of red.

I silently absorbed this information while I gazed at the camp. When he was finished, I piped up. "Fascinating. Tell me more!"

* * *

The rest of the morning went by in a blur of pretty colors, just like Solas had said. As he wove complex symbols into delicate patterns in the middle of the air, he simultaneously instructed me in the art of aura reading. A scant few hours later, after a brief snack of jerky, I found myself back in the silenced tent. Moments later, we were back in the sitting room in the fade sanctuary.

Only this time, we were not alone.

Two other figures sat in similar chairs around the cozy sitting room of the tower. One was Curiosity, still in the form of my old college buddy. The other… for a full second, the form in the other chair was a chaotic blurry thing, twisting and changing. For a second, I was afraid it might be a demon, but that passed quickly as the spirit resolved itself into…into…

"Rabbi Cohen?!" I blurted out. The face of my old rabbi brought back a veritable tidal wave of old emotions. I had not seen the man in over a decade, since before I had even left for college. I respected him more than any other religious leader I had ever met. Hell, when I was young, he was the first person I recognized that I truly respected outside of my family. With a jolt, I realized that there were only two spirits I knew of that would synchronize with the holy man's singular position in my memories. And only one of those would have free entry into Solas' bastion.

"….Wisdom? Is that you?" I said hesitantly.

The rabbi's eyes slid to mine and his face burst into his signature smile. Then they slid off me and to Solas, who was growling at me again.

_What is it this time? I haven't even done anything annoying yet!_

The smile shifted to gentle exasperation. "Don't be like that Solas. He didn't mean anything by it. He didn't even realize what he was doing, what with his connection being so powerful."

Solas scowled but did not move from his seat.

I stared quizzically at probably-wisdom, "What didn't I know I was doing? And what was that bit about being really powerful?"

"First, let me introduce myself. I am indeed Wisdom. I am so pleased to meet you James. I have heard so much about you from our mutual acquaintance." He said warmly, nodding toward Curiosity. "As to what I meant, I was referring to the fact that, even though you did it unconsciously, you pressed your idea of wisdom onto me without my consent. Solas is angry because, if you had a twisted vision of what constitutes wisdom, you might have corrupted me." He let out a soft chuckle, the beatific smile returning to his face. "If you hadn't noticed, my friend over there is very protective of me. But I find that I quite like this aspect. It's a shame I'll never be able to meet the original. He seems to be a very good man."

I got choked up for a brief moment, as another pang of vicious homesickness and grief engulfed me. "He was." I said softly.

"Can we stay on topic, please?" sighed Solas.

Ignoring him, Wisdom's face clouded. "I see. This face causes you pain…You miss him. Well, if you are half as clever as I think you are, then you'll have another outfit for me in there somewhere…" He said, staring at me intently. Unlike Solas' brute force attack from earlier, Wisdom's mental probe breezed through my mind like an ethereal gust of wind. It was tingly, slightly pleasant, and then gone. I barely even noticed. Wisdom let out a little cry of delight, "Oh my, this is spectacular! I simply MUST try it on!"

_Maybe spirits really can have a gender… it is currently wearing the form of a man, but it is certainly acting female like…in…._

_**OH.**_**_MY. FUCKING. GOD!_**

Wisdom had indeed found another avatar from my head. I stared dumbstruck at the figure now occupying the seat across from me. So did everyone else. Even in the land of dreams, a 5 foot nothing computer generated bipedal tortoise with a walking stick wasn't something you saw every day… at least on this world.

The first one to break the silence was Curiosity. "Well now we simply MUST know more about where you come from, mage. I have never seen anything even remotely like that."

The dam broke. I roared with laughter, convulsing so hard I actually fell out of my chair. "Of course you would like master Oogway…" I gasped between breaths. I put on my best fake Russian accent "Hahaha In Land off dreams, CGI aneemate You!"

Wisdom smiled beatifically at me. "I am pleased that this memory is a happy one. I will confess a certain fascination with it as well, even if it was just a fictional character. We really must speak more some other time. There are so many stories in that head of yours…" he said in Randall Duk Kim's pleasant voice. He stopped when we heard the sharp crack of wood snapping. Solas had literally crushed the arm of his chair from clenching it so hard. He opened his mouth to reprimand us, but Wisdom spoke over him. "As much fun as this is, we really should get to business da'len."

I took a deep breath and regained my composure, then spoke. "I know I'm on relatively thin ice here, but I'm going to put another condition on my aid. I know you Solas. I know the tyranny you resisted. I know your deeds. I know your triumph. I know its consequences. I know your guilt." I looked him straight in the eyes. "I know your intentions. I will say this very clearly. I want to help you take the Veil down Solas, for both selfish and selfless reasons. But not at the cost of human civilization on this planet. If you seek to rebuild Arlathan on the bones of my people, as the Ancient magisters did with Elvhenan, I will do everything in my power to stop you."

The silence hung heavily in the air. "With how much you know, do you really believe you could ever hope to defeat me?" Solas said ominously.

"Of course not. You could probably kill me right now. But it would cast suspicion on you and weaken your façade. And nothing would change. The Inquisition would proceed without my guidance. It would triumph, of course. Buuuut…." I gestured to the wall of the tower, closing my eyes and projecting a memory onto the substance of the fade like a TV screen.

* * *

_Corypheus falls to his knees, quickly regaining his feet in chaotic, jerky motions, clearly in immense pain… "Not like this!" he rages. "I have walked the halls of the Golden City! Crossed the ages!" He shouts in panic as he tries to keep control of the orb darting around crazily in midair, visibly unstable and crackling with malignant red energy. Slowly, Alexander stands up behind him, wearing endgame level mage robes, the anchor blazing on his palm. Corypheus' struggles grow more frantic. "Dumat! Ancient Ones! I beseech you! If you exist, if you ever truly existed, aid me now!" He cries out. His corrupted features are literally incapable of any expression but hatred, yet the desperation is clear in his voice and bearing. _

A thought is interwoven with the memory.

**_Oh suuure… now you pray to your god to save you… Now that you're LOSING! THAT ISN'T HOW IT WORKS YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH!_**

_ Alexander advances on him. Suddenly, the mark flares intensely, and the orb is forcibly ripped out of Corypheus' grasp, flying across the clearing to Alexander's hand. Corypheus falls to his knees and does not rise again._

_The orb now glows with the green energy of the anchor. It has changed its allegiances. As the music swells, Alexander thrusts his hand to the sky, unleashing a roaring pillar of emerald fire that rockets up from his hand and pierces the heavens above, striking directly at the heart of the breach. When the fire dies away, the breach is only a bright green pinprick in an otherwise peaceful sky. _

_Cut to Alexander's feet. The music quiets for a moment as the orb falls to the ground with an audible CLANG! It no longer glows, appearing to be nothing more than an elaborately decorated sphere._

_Alexander advances on the kneeling magister as large boulders fall from the sky. He holds the anchor out towards the villain. _

_"You wanted into the fade so badly?!" He roars at his enemy, voice transformed by righteous fury. Once more the Anchor flares brightly, and Corypheus screams in agony as he is visibly (and __**messily**__) crushed in on himself, his body coming apart as he implodes in a flash of neon green light. When the smoke settles, nothing remains of the being once known as "The Elder One". _

**Fade to black.**

_Alexander wakes up in the ruins. He gets up and looks around. He spots Solas walking over to the orb in visible distress. He kneels over the broken fragments of the orb, agonizing pain written across every inch of his face despite the somewhat shoddy graphics. He stares speechlessly at the broken piece in his hand. "The Orb" he says despondently as tears fall down his face._

_Alexander comes up behind him. "Corypheus is dead. That's the important thing." He says softly._

_"Yet so much has been lost…" Solas replies numbly. He places the shard back on the ground and stands. He glances back at Alexander, who raises an eyebrow at him in question. "There's more, isn't there?"_

_"It was not supposed to happen this way…" Solas says, his voice almost breaking under the weight of sadness._

_He turns away from Alexander, staring off into the distance. "No matter what comes, I want you to know that you shall always have my respect…" he says softly._

**Fade to black**

_An armored gauntlet presses against an Eluvian, wreathed in pale blue fire. Flemeth/Mythal stands before the mirror. "I knew you would come." She turns to look over her shoulder at an approaching Solas. "You should not have given your orb to Corypheus, Dread Wolf."_

_"I was too weak to unlock it after my slumber" he says hoarsely, still visibly distraught. "The failure was mine. I should pay the price, but the People, they need me." He says, voice nearly breaking. "I am so sorry." He weeps, as Flemeth pulls him into her embrace._

_"I am sorry as well, old friend." She tells him solemnly. Suddenly, she gasps as Solas' frame blurs, and cobalt lightning seems to drain from her body into Solas. He catches her as she collapses, obviously dead, then….turned to stone?! _

**_Did…Did he just fucking EAT HER?_**

_Solas gently lays her on the ground in repose, weeping. Then he turns to face the camera, his eyes completely black, pupils replaced with miniature galaxies of smokey blue lightning._

**Fade to black**

* * *

As I come back to myself, the room is dead silent. Wisdom and Curiosity both look grim, and Solas… Though I could feel waves of pain and despair radiating from him like a sun, his face might as well have been made of stone. Considering what I knew of the man, those emotions were likely only a small fragment of his true despair leaking from cracks in his mental defenses. The full weight of it must have been so soul crushing that I was amazed he could still keep it off his face.

"How did that come about?" he said, his voice hard and lifeless.

"The honest answer is I don't know. Its your ball, after all. My guess is that the inquisitor doesn't manage to get it away from him in time to stop it from being irreversibly corrupted." I told him. "As to WHY we didn't get there in time? I won't tell you. Not until I can trust you not to commit genocide."

Solas' face began to darken with rage. The candles on the walls guttered and turned neon green. I heard another bestial growl, but this time it wasn't coming from Solas' throat. When he next spoke, his voice seemed to come from the walls of the keep itself, resonating with both his voice, and the hunting cries of beasts.

**_HOW DARE YOU! YOU INGNORANT, PATHETIC QUICKLING CHILD! YOU THINK TO BLACKMAIL ME?! I AM THE LORD OF DREAMS! I AM THE GREAT WOLF, THE END OF AGES! YOU AND YOUR WHOLE RACE OF IGNORANT SAVAGES ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A MISTAKE!_**

**_JUST WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!_**

I could feel the force of his invective batter against both my mind and body like a great wind, making it difficult to see. But though it hurt my mind, I could still think. That in itself was rather shocking to me. I should be frightened. I should be so pants wettingly, underwear shittingly terrified that here in the fade my ego would just collapse under the weight of it and disintegrate. But instead I felt calm. It was oddly refreshing actually. There was no doubt that I was about to die. Nothing I could do would have the slightest chance of diverting this force of nature. So why bother being scared? It wasn't like it would accomplish anything. So I stood straight and tall in the face of his fury. As the full import of exactly what I was doing sank in, a smile found its way onto my face.

In that moment, I understood him. For the sake of his people and his principles, he had dared to defy the will of those who were thought to be gods. Had stood tall and proud, despite how badly the odds were stacked against him. Now I could say the same…

**_If only his name was Spartacus… then it would be perfect._**

Finally coming back to the (un)real world, I was amused to note that I was surrounded by a corona of power of my very own, this one the warm yellow tinged red of a merry campfire. It was smaller than Solas' of course, but it was still fairly badass. I let out a soft chuckle. When I opened my mouth, I barely recognized the voice that issued from my throat.

"**Who am I? I am outcast. I am one with many gifts, yet not enough humility to use them wisely. I am he who has crossed an incomprehensible vast void to arrive on the shores of a new world that knows nothing of my true nature. With me, I bring the double-edged sword of knowledge and arrogance. I am he who would dare to defy a mighty power for the sake of my people's happiness without flinching, for the sake of my own principles.**

**Can you truly not guess who I am, Fen'Harel? I might not be Solas, but I AM PRIDE!**

My only response from Solas was a mighty roar of so many different emotions I couldn't even count them, let alone identify them. Whatever Solas was going through was NOT something I wanted to witness from this close. At worst, it would attract demons like a lighthouse on a stormy night. Even at best, it was still the manifested emotional upheaval of a man with so much power that he was once thought to be a divine being.

Without any real understanding of what I was doing, I reached out into the fade with my mind and took hold of…_something… and __**pulled. **_After that, everything got a little hazy. The world dissolved into a riot of shifting colors and movement, as I heard Solas' tortured


	17. Does this mean I'm crazy? Possibly

I sat bolt upright in my bed.

Wow… even for me, that was some dream.

Taking a deep breath, I got up and crossed the room, hopping up to the spine of my couch so I could reach my alarm clock on top of my window. I shook my head to get the traces of sleep out of my system and went downstairs. It was already 8:30, so my younger siblings had already gotten up, ate, and left for school before my lazy ass. I needed to catch a ride to my bus stop with one of my parents. I could have walked but well… there's a reason I had put my alarm clock in a place where I had to do amateur parkour just to shut it off.

My father, as was his want, was reading his paper in the easy chair, sipping his coffee. Mom was emptying the dishwasher. My mother is a skinny woman, roughly 5'4, late 50s, with a shoulder length mane of brown hair with matching eyes. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about her appearance at first glance, and most strangers would not judge her to be particularly impressive. But that was because they do not know her. My mother is so many different things. Expert chef, certified nurse, lawyer, mother, activist, friend… the list goes on. Looking back, it's a wonder to me exactly how her small frame could contain her unremitting competence and sheer force of personality. Outside of our house, she had an uncanny knack bending people and systems to her will, for the betterment of our family. INSIDE the house, she ruled with an iron fist. The only person on the planet who could change her mind was my father, and not even he could manage it every time. No one was safe from her exacting standards.

Then there was my father. Sitting at the coffee table as he was, with his reading glasses and his head buried in the Times, he too, would not give much of an impression. But unlike mom, all he had to change that was to stand up. Towering over most men at 6'6, broad shouldered, straight backed. He had my same big ears, large nose, and bushy eyebrows (or rather, I had his). Still, even with his more imposing appearance, his true strength, like his wife's, was on the inside. He was kind, but absolutely firm in his standards for both himself and others. As easily as he laughed and joked with his MANY friends, if he was upset, the force of his temper filled the room like a storm cloud, and his gaze bore into you with almost physical weight.

But… something was wrong. Why was his hair… silver? Don't get me wrong, he made it look amazing, but my father was only… only… in his…

My vision swam, and my stomach did somersaults as I fell to the floor as my memories came flooding back to me. I wasn't in middle school anymore… I had not lived in this house full time for over a decade, hadn't even set foot in it for half that. I was not a child anymore, and my parents were not middle aged either. The idyllic scene I had conjured vanished into smoke as my parents vanished, and Wisdom/Oogway sat on the couch in my father's place. I sank to my knees and wept.

_I'm never going to see them again!_

I wept bitter tears for those I had left behind, trapped between grief for my own loss, and soul crushing guilt at the pain I had inflicted on them by vanishing. My brother would take it the worst, I knew. When I was going through the worst of my depression, he had made me promise him that I would never hurt myself. It was the one promise I had never even considered breaking.

I do not know how long I lay there on the kitchen floor sobbing. I never took my eyes off the floor, but as I lay there, I felt warm hands on my back.

"Hush James… It's alright. Everything is going to be alright." A soft, feminine voice said from next to me. Gently, the hands began to scratch my back, just like mom used to do when I was small. The featherlight touches sent waves of almost indescribably soothing sensation rippling across my body. I did nothing to stop them. The tears did not stop flowing, but slowly, I managed to cease the sobbing and wailing, and then it all just came pouring out.

"I want to go home." I said hoarsely. "I've nearly died 5 times in the space of 7 days since I came to this planet, and 3 of them were explicitly MY FAULT! Ever since I landed on this weird rock, I've jumped from one catastrophe to another, stepping on seemingly every single foot I come across along the way. We haven't really even STARTED the story yet! If I'm this beaten down before we even start clearing the starting area, how IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK! Am I going to be able to manage when the actually DIFFICULT shit starts to go down? If I fuck this up for Alexander, it will LITERALLY mean the END OF THIS FUCKING PLANET! Without the Inquisition to stop him, that delusional, psychotic egotist is going to turn this whole planet into HELL! Millions dead, dictatorial repression, lots of black spiky armor, the whole fucking evil overlord list! If he weren't so terrifying, he'd practically be a joke!"

Wisdom stayed quiet as I vented my spleen all over the room, continuing to softly massage my back.

I took a deep breath. "I just want to go home. Even the magic powers aren't worth that much blood on my hands. I want to go back home, to the place where the only life I can ruin with my incompetence is my own." I said softly.

We stayed there on the floor for a time, silent except for the slight sound of my breathing. Then Wisdom broke the silence.

"You underestimate yourself greatly lethal'lin." She chided gently, "Yes, you have made mistakes. But you have not only survived them, you learned from them. Though you have Seen much, I do not think you know how much you have already changed with your actions. You are intelligent enough to understand the implications of your foresight, Yet . You are wise enough to know what is truly important to you, even with the immense power you have been gifted. Most impressive of all…" She paused briefly, collecting her thoughts.

"Letha'lin, I have known Solas for thousands of years. In all that time, he has faced many mighty powers who wished to end him or thwart his goals. He has been faced with many terrible decisions; whose consequence would have broken lesser men. He has been confronted by those same forces and consequences time and again. Some of the powers have cowed him, but they never made change his goals, only the shape of his schemes to bring them low. Some of the decisions have haunted him, some of his victims have made him regret his choices."

"But in all that time, not a single one of the foes, trials, or tragedies he has faced through the eons, has ever been able to make him doubt himself or his choices. Until today." Wisdom nodded to me. "In the center of his power, in the face of his wrath, you were powerless to stop him from removing you as a threat to his plans. Yet you defied him. You rebuked him in a way that few have ever dared to, and even fewer have survived." She turned my head with her hand until I was staring into her eyes. "Any man who can do that, in the face of near certain death… that man has the conviction to overcome any trial."

I opened my mouth to disagree, to tell her that I was weak, a failure, pathetic… but I felt a short, sharp pain in my skull, that reminded me a bit of a spell miscast. Also familiar to me, was the voice that accompanied it.

**_For fucks sake! For once in your life James, could you cut that ridiculous sad boy shit out and just listen to her?_**

I whipped my head around and stared in shock. Sitting in my father's easy chair… was me? He was not as broad shouldered, good looking, or muscular as the fear demon doppelganger had been, but he wasn't my twin either. While not muscular he wasn't as flabby, his hair was neatly combed instead of my usual chaotic mess of curls. He sat up straight in the chair, eyes alert, focused and intense. His face was no different from mine, but he was still somehow more handsome anyway. And I could hear his voice both outside my head, and inside it. And if that was not enough for me to guess who he was, he was wearing a black shirt that read

**Sarcasm**

**Nature's natural defense against stupidity.**

**_For god's sake James, you need to stop keeping me out before it gets us killed._**

I instinctively grasped that the being sitting before me was one of the aspects of myself. Judging from his appearance and tone, I'd guess he was made up of most of my better qualities. The metaphorical angel on my shoulder.

**_Of course I am, genius. This is the fade. I have more room to move around in here._**

"No one in the games ever described anything like this…"

**_Newsflash dumbass! This isn't the freaking game anymore. Also, your connection to the fade is quite different from a native's. Not to mention the bit where you are operating on nearly 72 uninterrupted hours of consciousness. Your mind is starting to unravel at the edges, which makes it FAR easier for me to do this, but also easier for me to separate from you entirely. Then you would really be fucked. In the immortal words of Harry Dresden, "If you weren't pretty close to crazy right now, do you really think you'd be talking to yourself?"_**

"How do you know all of … Oh wait, let me guess. This place is a lot more user-friendly for the subconscious parts of my mind than the other way around."

My doppelgänger gave me double finger guns.

_**See! You're really smart. If you could just listen to me more often, instead of repressing me with excuses, we could be exactly as impressive as she thinks we are! **_

He gestured at wisdom, who was now sitting on the window seat in the form of master Oogway, staring at us both with a serene smile on her/him…it's face.

**_Now, to business. I can use the mental instability to our advantage, shift some things around to help us improve. The fade is really good for that sort of thing. Still, I need you to understand that I only exist because you were stupid enough to actually believe that I'm a separate entity, instead of just another part of your ego. That has got to stop._**

Waitwaitwait… "Shift some things around to help us improve"? You'd be re-writing my mind!" I panicked.

He snorted **_Nothing so blunt, I assure you. I'll just…shift some things to fit better. You'll change, sure, but you were already doing that. Or do you mean to tell me you think your still exactly the same person as the idiot who threw a PB&J sandwich in Jack Korbin's face in the first grade…_**

I rolled my eyes at the smirking figure but nodded. "Touché"

_**You know you can trust me. After all, I AM YOU. Just take my hand and try to wake up. Once we get back home, I'll take over and send our mind into true sleep. I should warn you though, you won't remember this as clearly as a regular fade dream. Not that it should matter, since we have witnesses.**_

He gestured around the room, where I noted with surprise that Curiosity was sitting at the kitchen counter, staring intently at us.

"Of course I'd be happy to fill in any blanks you have. I'll want your perspective of events before and after the change. By the void, I haven't had so much fun since Darinius!" he cheered.

I turned back to my better half, seeing his outstretched hand. I took a deep breath and grasped it. I felt an instant surge of warmth and comfort sweep through my form, the lights dimmed around me as I "fell" back across the veil to Thedas.


	18. Training Montage

"Goddamnit!" I hissed viciously under my breath as I violently jerked my hand away from the cutting board. I'd cut my fucking hand again! On a childhood reflex, I brought the slashed digit up to my mouth and licked the blood off the wound to keep it clean. Not exactly standard medical practice, certainly. but then, in an agrarian society where maybe only a few thousand people _in the world _understood what the word "sterilize" meant, I could think of much worse ideas of how to handle the situation. Granted, the level of local medical sophistication was no longer relevant to me, at least as far as small injuries like this went. I could cheat now.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, doing my best to clear my mind. Once (most) of the voices in my head had shut up, I tentatively focused my awareness on the swirling vortex of energy in my chest that I had dubbed my "Mana pool". Very gently, I coaxed a miniscule amount of power out of the pool with my mind and bent it into my desired shape.

_Regrow/repair/restore/finger_

When I was sure I had not made any mistakes in the crafting, I released the energy into my own body. As my awareness floated back into my skull, I could actually feel the working move through my body. It was like a pleasant tingling sensation that raced up my spine, down my left arm, and into the target I had given it. I felt a flash of heat in the wounded digit, then nothing. I took the finger out of my mouth and simply looked at the unblemished skin in fascination. No doubt my newfound abilities had contributed to my equally new clumsiness with kitchen knives, but I just couldn't find it within me to care. Doing magic never got any less awesome. As I gazed at my finger like it contained the mysteries of the universe, my mind began to wander.

After the night of my attempted negotiations with Solas, things had finally started to calm down for me. Once I (begrudgingly) resumed sleeping the normal way, I wouldn't say I felt better, exactly, but I felt more…stable. Looking back on my previous actions, I was a little annoyed that I had not realized something was wrong sooner. The effect had been remarkably similar to the mania I had felt in the days after I graduated middle school and stopped taking the ADHD meds I'd been on since I was a kid.

Over the course of the next several weeks, I settled into a routine. My mornings were spent training with Solas (who was noticeably colder towards me), Alexander and the handful of other battlemages, mostly for quarterstaff training. Well… not really _training, _so much as "letting the others beat the shit out of me with sticks". That had gone on for a solid week before I got even a little skill at defending myself, but I soldiered on.

From there I went to get healed then hang out in the infirmary. The healers assured me that my issues with fine control were a common problem in novice or potential healers, so they gave me some mental exercises to help me put tighter reins on my power. In return, I taught them about basic medical practice. Washing hands, keeping the workspace clean, sanitizing tools in boiling water, etc. They were all skeptical of me and my methods at first, but they came around pretty quickly once they realized that some of their spells were actually easier to cast and faster to work when performed in a sterile environment. From what I understood, most basic healing only sped up the body's natural healing processes, so it made sense that they would work better on a body that didn't have to waste any resources killing an infection.

To my astonishment, between the unforeseen presence of Gregoire and the survival of nominally loyal underage mages that survived under his protection, one of the agents from the game, Enchanter Ellendra, had actually joined the Inquisition of her own accord, rather than needing to be convinced. She took up the responsibility of continuing the apprentices' formal Circle education. Though it took some convincing on Alexander's part to get her to allow me to attend the class with them, it only took a few classes for her to realize how horrifyingly ignorant I was about how magic was practiced. After that, she agreed to set aside some time for private lessons. Under her uncompromising tutelage, I began to learn the fundamentals of Circle taught magic. It was fairly basic, compared to some of the magic systems I'd had to keep track of to follow some of my fantasy books back home. As I had suspected, magic as practiced by the Circles worked pretty much exactly the way Vivienne operated. The mage uses sheer strength of will to impose rigid structure onto the otherwise chaotic energies of the fade. I listened and learned, despite some of the improvements I could see in the system. After that fiasco on the road, I knew I needed a proven foundation to work off of, before I continued any more of my batshit insane experiments.

From those lessons, I would move on to my favorite part of the day… helping in the kitchens. I grew up in the house of a woman with _prodigious _skill in the culinary arts. With her example as a standard, I had never really considered myself a good cook. However, I still loved to eat and to help people. I also liked cutting things. As I got older, I began helping her with the small tasks. Measuring ingredients, cutting up vegetables, fetching things from the closet… After a few years, she started calling me her "sous chef". So, helping out in the kitchens at Crossroads wasn't that challenging for me.

Mostly, I just chopped up vegetables. It was not like the stock of ingredients was that full…or that varied. What salt we had was mostly used to dry and store meat and the spice cabinet was non-existent. I mean it literally did not exist. There were only a few seasonings that could be grown or foraged locally and importing anything else was not exactly an option for medieval peasants. Still, there were a few chickens, so after one particularly enlightening discussion with one of the surviving dairy farmers, I managed to create something close to a cheese omelet. Once I explained to the cooks that they could use the (relatively) easy to replace foodstuff to help stretch out the supplies of meat, it quickly became a staple in the village.

At night, I hung out with my expanding group of spirit buddies. The night after the confrontation with Solas, Curiosity and Wisdom dropped by and _insisted _that I tell them more about my homeworld. I happily obliged them. I knew anything I told Wisdom would probably reach Solas' ears eventually, but it was much easier to get along with, and I trusted it's discretion. I had a blast showing off some of the more spectacular scenes in my memories. My showboating attracted a few other spirits as well. I decided to cap off my party with a screening of "Kung Fu Panda", in honor of Wisdom's new favorite form. THAT really got some attention. After that, every night was party night in my (dream) house. The absurdity of it all was hilarious to me. I'd had to be transported to a fantasy world, then learn how to cross into an entirely separate dimension of reality, just to figure out how to throw a decent house party.

My three most frequent guests were Wisdom, Curiosity and Creativity, a new friend that Curiosity had introduced me to. It loved to hang out with me, since apparently my subconscious could not settle on a definitive avatar for it. Thus, every time it showed up, it had a different body. Unless it was movie night, I usually spent at least a little time each night discussing my magical education with them. Unlike in my classes with Ellendra, I was completely open with my spirit friends about my theories and guesses about magic. I even explained some of the fictional magic systems from my books to them. Those talks were Wisdom's favorites. Between the three of them, they managed to help me figure out which of my crazy schemes were workable, which would get me killed, and which ones would destroy the fabric of space and time and/or kill thousands of people. There weren't that many of the last ones… but there WERE more than one. As a result, I had added quite a few spells to my magical toolbox. Nothing as dangerous as the plasma attack from the road, but it was still early days. One of the more interesting discoveries I'd made was that my body seemed to be much more conductive to fade energy than even most mages. This meant that healing magic generally worked better on me; and healing _myself_ was a cinch.

_THUMP!_

My reverie was suddenly interrupted by an explosion of pain in the back of my head, followed by the voice of a very irate housewife.

"I told you James! No lollygagging in MY kitchen. I don't care if you really _are _a bloody prophet. If I catch you staring off into nothing again instead of helping me with the stew, I will stop letting you assist in here young man. See if I don't!"

Matron Peggy was a dour woman in her late 40s, with iron grey hair and piercing brown eyes. She _looked _nearly a decade older, but you would never know it from listening to her. I had no doubt that, if she really tried, she could yell louder than the drill sergeants in the military camp. Of course, she didn't really need to. She didn't hold any kind of official authority in the village, she wasn't even the wife of the headman. But when she talked, _you listened. _It seemed that no matter what planet you're on, busybody maternal figures were the same everywhere.

"Yes miss Peggy," I nodded to the domineering woman. "I apologize for my absentmindedness. I was thinking of my studies."

She glared at me. "That's all well and good, lad. But if you're so "distracted" that you're no good to me, then get out of my kitchen!" She stated, pointing to the door with one hand, the other one menacing me with her combat soup ladle.

I couldn't really disagree with her logic, and I did NOT want to get on the formidable woman's permanent shit list, so I obediently shuffled out the door like a good little boy.

* * *

For some time after that, I simply wandered around the village for a while peoplewatching. It was an old habit I'd picked up walking around my old college campus. I fancied myself something of an amateur Sherlock Holmes, trying to figure out as much as I could about random passersby simply from their outward appearance. It was a fun game to play with myself, but it never produced anything useful.

But now…I had the **Sight**.

As a person on the spectrum, I had always been garbage at reading people, so the ability to physically see other people's emotions via their auras was a revelation for me. I could finally know when people were just fucking with me, or when I needed to take them seriously. When they were irritated with me even while wearing a polite face… all the little things that normal people usually figure out before puberty. It was awesome. It didn't exactly fix nearly two decades worth of stunted social development or introversion, but it did make it easier to be around people. It also gave me a kind of radar for homing in on sources of emotional intensity.

"James! James! There you are! I have been looking everywhere for you!" cried out a high-pitched voice.

In other words, _children_.

I turned my head to watch the boy approach me from the north. The boy was not finished growing yet, only four feet and change, most of it skin and bones from lack of food before the Inquisition's arrival. The malnutrition had not reached his face before we arrived, so he still had the puffy cheeks and rounded chin of the young on a face framed by an unruly mess of brown curls.

For the past week, I had been looking out for the boy at the request of the Ellendra. The kid had apparently idolized the apprentice who'd been possessed by the rage demon the day we arrived. He was taking the fall of his best friend hard, and the steely eyed old teacher knew enough to understand that she wasn't the best person to keep him from lashing out, giving up, or make any other rash decisions that were so much more dangerous to a mage child than they were to others. I'll never forget exactly how she went about asking me to do it, either.

_"I do not know what to make of you, young man." She sighed, "When we first met, I took you for the worst kind of charlatan. You had only the most rudimentary understanding of magic, yet your opinions carry great weight with both the Seeker and the Herald, and through them, the entire inquisition. I believed that the so called "Prophet of the Maker" was nothing more than an opportunistic manipulator. Yet, if you have given the Herald any bad advice, I have not seen any evidence of it. In our lessons, you have learned so much, so quickly, it is almost enough to convince me your previous incompetence was an act. There are far too many mysteries surrounding you for me to trust you completely. However," She paused, and shot me another meaningful look, "I can no longer in good conscience call you a malicious or a charlatan._

It was probably the most direct feedback anyone had been willing to say to my face since I came here, and I had a lot of respect for anyone who was willing to say stuff like that to my face. The least I could do was obey her.

As it turned out, it really wasn't such a huge ask. Heston of Amberly was a pretty bright kid. I allowed him to follow me around throughout my day, and though he had little interest in cooking, he loved to watch the sparring in the morning, and he was always full of questions for the healers during the after action healing sessions. However, even though he still possessed the seemingly limitless well of energy and enthusiasm that managed to make me, a 24-year-old man in his prime, feel old, he still demonstrated an admirable amount of self control around the healers while they were working. God knows I wasn't that self-possessed when I was his age. As we got to know each other better, I began to learn more about my new protégé. He was born in Amberly, a middling sized town in Amaranthine, just before the outbreak of the fifth blight. Since he was so young, he never had to experience the horrors of that event, since it was over so quickly, but it had caused his family to flee to the city of Amaranthine…just in time to be there for the Mother's invasion of the city during the events of DA Awakening. Though he had no memories of that night, he'd grown up hearing tales of the heroic warden commander of Ferelden, Bane of Urthemiel. Kid had a serious case of hero worship. For that reason, he'd been overjoyed when his powers manifested. He went willingly to the Circle, and, like any fanboy, immediately set about trying to learn as much as he could about his subject, one Felix Amell. Oh, and also magic. He…

My train of thought was suddenly and violently shattered by a sudden poke in the ribs.

"JaaAAAaames? Are you in there?" he grinned at me.

I shot him a chagrinned look and nodded. This was one of the little things that HE did for ME. I'd always been an introvert, but with my shiny new magic to play with right inside my own head, I now literally needed a minder to bring me down out of the clouds whenever the mood struck me. Ellendra had probably figured that out too, cagey old fox that she was.

"Sorry buddy, were you saying something? Sorry you keep needing to repeat things…" I apologized.

"Its fine James." He grinned even wider, "Its all in a days work for the prophet's poke boy!" he proclaimed dramatically, barely suppressing a chuckle. I buried my head in my hands. He knew I hated both the title, and that nickname, but he found it funny to torture me with them. And in the case of his …unfortunate… self-imposed position, I couldn't even explain why I hated it so much. After all, while the church's list of sins was distressingly long, on this world, pedophilia was not one of them as far as I knew.

I rolled my eyes at Heston. "You know how much I hate that ridiculous title." My eyes darted up to the sky, taking note of the position of the sun. "Where exactly are we going, this late in the day? Neither of us is particularly keen on missing dinner, and the sun is beginning to set…" I said, looking around me with some alarm. I had no idea where I was! From my general knowledge of the region I knew we were somewhere northeast of the village, but in truth while I can navigate like a pro with a map in my hand, without a reference to work from, I get turned around very easily.

"For that matter, where are we?" I asked hesitantly.

Heston's smile did not flicker. "Oh this won't take very long, we're almost there!"

It would be a lie to say that I was not starting to get a bad feeling about this, but I shook it off. I kept rough track of Alexander's progress through the region, and I knew he'd cleared all the rifts and most of the enemy camps in this general area. I was fairly confident the only dangers we might face were belligerent wildlife, and I could handle any of those with simple attack spells. I followed my young friend along a forest path further northwest a ways, before I began to smell something on the air. Something delicious! I took a deep sniff just to make sure I wasn't imagining it. "Is…Is that STEAK?" I wondered aloud.

Heston paused, then took a tentative whiff of his own. Somehow, his smile got even wider, and I saw a flare of excitement in his aura. "Oh boy, he cooked something? Come on James, you do _not _want to miss this. He's an amazing cook!" he told me. Then he darted off into woods.

I immediately took off after him. "Wait up Heston, you can't go off on your own like this outside the village! It isn't safe!" I called after him. All the while, my mind was turning over his words.

** _"He" _ ** _cooked something. I'm being taken to meet someone. Heston doesn't seem nervous at all, he clearly knows and trusts whoever it is. That means it's almost certainly another mage. And if the person was with the inquisition, he'd be staying in Crossroads and not camping out a fair distance from the base with his own food…_

I suddenly broke through the tree line and found myself in a small clearing.

There was a single canvas lean-to set up against one of the larger trees, and a small campfire burning cheerily in a ring of stones nearby. Atop the stones rested a grid of wrought iron. And on top of the metalwork… was a prodigious slab of meat cooking in the fire. Tending to the steak was a tall man wearing the robes of a circle enchanter. As we entered the glade, he lifted his gaze from the dancing of the flames.

"Good evening, gentlemen. Heston, you are looking well!" He turned to me, a warm smile on his face. "You must be James Black, the alleged seer our young friend has told me so much about! I am Basil, proud member of the college of libertarians, and former Senior enchanter of the Starkhaven Circle. I welcome you to my camp. Come, come! Sit with me and enjoy the meal!" he said cheerfully.

My instincts were screaming at me that something was off here, but I still curious exactly what. Slowly, I walked over to the campfire and took the offered seat.

Instantly, I heard rustling from the trees at the edge of the clearing. I looked up in time to see nearly a dozen men in mage robes emerge from the tree line, staves in hand. None of them looked like they'd came here for a steak dinner.

Alarm bells started going off in my head, along with admiral Ackbar yelling his catchphrase

The mage, Basil, nodded to one of the other men, and turned back to me, the smile vanishing from his face.

"I believe we have much to discuss…"

* * *

Sorry for going dark a while. This chapter, being the first one I've written that involves multiple scenes and timeskips, took me a while to get just right. Along the way, I started planning my first arc. Its going to be a short one, but I'll need the practice for what is coming later in the story.

My search for a beta reader is STILL ongoing, so any interested candidates please PM at author Jokeslayer94 on .

Stay healthy out there

-Jokeslayer94


	19. A Meeting of Egos

**A Meeting of Egos**

"I believe we have much to discuss…"

Slowly, cautiously, I walked over to the fire and took a seat. Heston, completely oblivious to the danger, ran forward and started eating the meat that the man, Basil, had left for him. None of the other mages reacted. Stunned by the unlooked for danger, my mind was set racing, and I could feel the edges of my battlemind beginning to manifest. But now was not the time to fight. I was both outnumbered and outclassed.

_Besides… I can use this._

There was opportunity here if I could just play my cards right. I still remember the first time I played through this level in the game. I knew that the mage-templar conflict would play a significant role in the plot, so when I heard about the skirmishes in the hinterlands, I assumed that the work of diplomacy would start there. It did not. At first, I was not all that discouraged when the templars charged in swords swinging, and I had to slaughter them. They were all religious fanatics, far too convinced of their own righteousness and divine purpose to worry about silly little things like the consequences of their actions.

When the mages did the same thing, I was stunned. I actually reloaded an old save and went around doing the other quests in the region, assuming that I had missed a quest that would allow me to approach them diplomatically. Once I finished most of them, I was annoyed that it had "escaped me". I was so sure that I actually broke my "no walkthroughs on first playthrough" rule to find it. When I finally confirmed that there was in fact NO way to parlay with the apostates in the Witchwood, I was so disappointed. I knew they were scared, but my herald was a mage! They should have heard me out! Mages were supposed to train to control their emotions, not allow their emotions to control them. I had always wished there were some way to save them. This man in front of me seemed like a chance to do that. But to accomplish my goal, I also had to avoid being blown up by those I sought to preserve.

Fumbling for a plan, I took the one safe option that offered me a chance to process my situation. I started eating my own dinner. I almost got sidetracked by how good it was. The meat was well seasoned, and almost perfectly cooked. It was the most delicious thing I'd eaten since I came to this world. Through an effort of will, I wrenched my mind away from thoughts of food and examined my situation.

Basil's robe was made of a finer material than was typical out here in the wilderness and was noticeably cleaner for someone camping out in the elements. Opening my Sight, my eyes were immediately drawn to his staff. It was made of dark metal, tapering to a spearpoint at the base. At its head, the metal expanded outward into a multifaceted globe the that pulsated with a power I could sense from clear across the glade. It was like the magical equivalent of putting my hand on a running electronic device and feeling the heat buildup in its inner workings. From there, I turned my gaze turned to the ring of men surrounding me. All were clearly mages, what with their glowing staves and flowing robes and shit, but not all were as presentable or affable seeming as Basil. I took a moment to scrutinize their auras as well. They were all on their guard, with undercurrents of fear and varying levels of anger. But none of it was directed at me.

Oh, they were prepared to attack me if I stepped out of line, and they were definitely suspicious of me, but there was also… _hope?! _Why on earth did **_I _**make them hopeful?

Eager to break the silence, I looked to Basil.

"What did you wish to discuss, Mage Basil?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You are unusually polite for a young man, Ser James."

. "Your men back there hold my life in the palm of their hands, and you have apparently cooked me a steak dinner. And cooked it rather skillfully, I might add. In my opinion, both of those things earn you my good manners, though each for different reasons. By the way, is this garlic? Where did you find garlic in the middle of the wilderness?" I chuckled faintly.

Basil grinned boyishly at me. "It seems I am speaking to a fellow gourmand, that's a good nose you've got there, lad! I didn't find it here of course. I brought my own!" he informed me cheerfully, reaching into a pocket on his belt and bringing out a glass vial containing several bulbs of the fragrant herb. Now it was my turn to arch an eyebrow at him. These were roughly medieval times. Here, glass was a rare and expensive luxury. Even the small amount that made up his spice rack was notable.

"Before we get started, there is one little issue that must be addressed." Basil said as he reached out to clap Heston on the shoulder. There was a brief flash of light, and suddenly Basil was gently lowering Heston's limp body to the ground. I jerked in my seat and gaped at Basil in abject horror. Basil shook his head at me.

"No, James. He is merely sleeping. Children have no concept of restraint, and I can't have him gabbing to anyone else about our little chat. When we are done here, I will wake him up, and he will think he dozed off after eating a rich meal." He said gently, a wave of grief and sadness sweep momentarily over his aura. "I have already seen enough injured children in my life. I have no wish to add to the total with my own hands." He murmured.

It spoke well of him that he felt guilty about manipulating a child like this, but then, he had still _done it_. Either way, we needed to keep this moving along.

"Sooo, about that discussion you wanted to have?" I prodded.

Basil straightened up in his seat. "Right, to business then. Since I am the organizer of this little gathering, I wanted to start with a few questions. Most importantly, what is the inquisition's position with regard to the mages and the templars?"

I could faintly hear the rustling of cloth as Basil's entourage leaned in closer to hear my next words.

"Directly? We don't really have one. Our mandate is to restore order. Right now, that means all operations are directed towards the goal of sealing the great whopping whole in the sky, and all of the fade rifts spewing demons everywhere." I told him. "but of course, that isn't what you really want to know." Basil nodded. I sighed. "Unfortunately, that really is the answer. We aren't here in the hinterlands specifically because of your fellows and the templars. We came here to blood our troops, secure supplies, mounts and most important of all, political capital. We are a young power, and understand that we will need to grow our reputation and influence to secure the aid we need to seal the sky." I said.

"That makes sense, but…" was as far as he got, before one of the mages behind me blurted out "But are you going to recreate the Circles or not!" I turned in my seat to look at the man, who seemed to be younger than the others. I added a glare of my own to match the death glares all of his fellows were now shooting him. Clearly, this one was supposed to keep his trap shut. He seemed to share my knack for being annoying.

"Empty Night! What is wrong with you people? Your fucking status quo is dead and buried. Nobody cares about the fucking Circles anymore. Why is it so hard to believe that all we care about is _stopping demons from raining from the sky_?!" I hissed at him.

Refusing to back down, the young man glared angrily right back at me. "Don't give me that shit! You can close the breach any time you want! You were the ones that opened it!" he snarled.

About to launch another verbal salvo, his words stopped me dead in my tracks, and the clearing plunged into dead silence. I whirled around when the sound of Basil facepalming rang from behind me.

"Well, that wasn't exactly how I wanted to get confirmation you didn't know, but I guess I have it now…" he said in exasperation.

"Confirmation of what?"

"That you didn't know Justinia blew up the Conclave so her pet chosen one could rebuild the south out of the chaos." He deadpanned.

"WHAT?!" I yelped, goggling at him in confusion. This was not how I had pictured this meeting going.

"Its just a theory of course. I have no hard proof. And yet, I was not born yesterday. It should be patently obvious to any mage worthy of the title that the breach was caused by a rogue third party who wished to use the resulting chaos to further their agenda. I believe that it was in fact, Justinia herself. She calls a conclave of nearly every single member of the leadership of all three sides of this mess, then she kills them all. Now, as the dust settles, her Hands have created a political entity to lead the charge to restore peace and order to all of the south, all behind the cover offered by a charismatic young mage "chosen one", naïve enough to believe himself a hero of legend."

I just stared at him in shock as my mind struggled to process his words. My first reaction was to dismiss this whole meeting as pointless, and Basil as batshit crazy. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made…

From where Basil was standing, with all the things he knew, it actually fit remarkably well! So well, in fact, that if Justinia had actually possessed the means to create something like the breach, I thought she might have actually done it. As her _actual _final moments proved, she was willing to sacrifice her own life for her goals.

Justinia had the motive and the opportunity. The problem was that she did not have the means to create the breach. But Basil would not believe that. His theory of events, when taken seriously, actually made a lot more sense than what had _actually happened_!

I hung my head and snarled in frustration. Just to let out some of my nervous tension, I made a show of muttering angrily and ringing my hands for a bit, before visibly calming myself down with a deep breathing exercise. I looked up to find Basil looking at me with curiosity.

"Judging by your reaction, I'm thinking you might have suspected something yourself." He stated questioningly.

"No, its not that. Its just that you got so much of your theory right, that there is no way I'm going to be able to get you to accept the bits you got wrong!" I sighed.

At this, Basil narrowed his eyes at me. "Oh? And how exactly do YOU know what happened at the Conclave, young man?" he asked menacingly.

As Basil finished his tirade, I sat silently for a time, deciding which of my cards to play. I couldn't brute force my way through this, he was to sure of his own reasoning. I knew I wasn't a very good manipulator… But I was a FANTASTIC bullshit artist.

_I need to go full on Dumbledor on this guy._

"Your theory is sound, Enchanter Basil, but unfortunately there are players at the table you don't know about. You are looking at the wrong picture." I spoke quietly into the silence, "the truth is that apart from low level skirmishes like the ones in this vale, the mage templar war is already over. The only people who could have saved the Templars from the darkness that now stalks the land died at the Conclave. By now, they are already damned. It will come for the mages next, of course, but it will only be able to take them if they choose to allow it. Unlike the templars, they will be given a choice." I said in my best "Mysterious wizard voice". I looked up from the fire to see Basil staring incredulously at me. "Oh, I see. You dismissed the whole "Prophet of the Maker business as charlatanism?"

Basil nodded mutely at me from across the campfire, face unreadable.

I chuckled. "You are not entirely wrong. I am no prophet. I speak to no gods. Only spirits. You see, Basil, I really can see the future. According to my late mentor, I am apparently the most powerfully gifted seer born in hundreds of years. I'm not so sure, honestly. My personal theory is that the events of the next decade or so, are so momentous, so massive in scale and effect, that the echoes they leave in the Fade ripple through time itself."

Basil was silent for another few minutes, obviously thinking my words. The only sound in the glade was the crackling of the campfire.

"Assuming all of that wasn't a great heaping pile of druffalo shit," he said cautiously, "why do you not simply prevent any of this" he gestured to the woods around him, "from happening?"

"A few reasons. The easiest one to accept is that I would not have been believed. By the time enough had happened for me to be able to prove my abilities, we were already far past the point where any of it could have been stopped. More than that, however, is the simple truth that not everything I see CAN be subverted, or even should be. The Conclave was one such. I have known about it for years now, but even if anyone had believed me, preventing the events that transpired that night from occurring would have doomed us all." At this, Basil drew in a breath to yell at me, but I didn't let him. "But, all of that is irrelevant either way. The simplest reason is that I had no chance of stopping the thing that created the breach. It is an ancient thing, steeped in dark power and terrible wrath. Felling such a foe is no simple thing." I said darkly.

"You can't be serious. You make it out to be some horror out of a children's story!" he said nervously.

I snorted. "In many ways, that is exactly what it is. If told you all of its many names, you would likely recognize at least one of them."

At this, I could feel the tension in the clearing skyrocket. All around me, I could feel the mix of shocked emotions swell in the auras of Basil's entire party, stirring up an ethereal wind that buffeted against my senses.

He scoffed at me in disbelief. I simply shrugged. There was another period of silence, broken this time by Basil.

"Why are you telling me this? If all truly is as you say, then what can be done about it?" He asked me.

"Why am I telling you this? In truth, the burden of this knowledge weighs heavily on my shoulders. I cannot risk telling my friends, since most of my visions are _about them_. However, there is one good thing about my visions…" I smirked.

"And what would that be?" Basil asked dryly.

I chuckled. "No matter how old you actually are, you get to act the part of some wise sage from an ancient saga, and talk in cryptic riddles that you know piss people off, and no one can gainsay you. It also gives you many excuses to be overdramatic, even with people who usually don't tolerate shit like that."

By now, the ring of mages surrounding me had dissolved, its members drifting to seats around the fire with Basil and I. At this declaration, the whole gathering burst out laughing, and Basil actually put his head in his hands.

Bursts of laughter erupted from all present, "Andraste's Ass, boy!" barked a new voice, belonging to one of the now seated mages, He was a large man, with broad shoulders and a neatly trimmed brown beard. Stifling his laughter he rumbled, "Only senior enchanter are ever allowed to play that game in the Circles! It was one of the reasons everyone wanted the job!" Slowly, we all regained our composure as silence returned to the clearing.

"As for your other question? I was not lying when I told you how little I can actually change the things I see. I cannot stop any of the awful things that will occur over the next few years. But I CAN reduce their impact. I can prepare people for them, steer them away from worst case scenarios, help the victims through their ordeals and make sure fewer people die." I lifted my gaze from the fire and met his eye. "But I can't do any of that without the Inquisition. They are the counterbalance to the rising darkness, just as the grey wardens are to the terror of the Blight." I said, then broke off my speech to yawn explosively. I hadn't realized how late it had gotten, and how tired I was.

I rolled my eyes. "Look Basil, I am a stubborn enough person to recognize the trait in others. We could sit here and try to convince eachother until morning, and the only thing that would increase would be the headache. I'm going to go back to Crossroads. However, I think we both agree that this is not over." I got up, and gestured for him to wake Heston. He complied, and I quickly explained that he had nodded off after eating dinner, but we had to go back to the village. As we left the campground, I could not resist a final jab at the mages around the fire.

"Be seeing you, Basil…"

* * *

I would like to apologize to all of you for taking so long to get this out. It's my first divergence from the canon, and I totally underestimated how much more difficult it would make everything. It also forced me to come to grips with the fact that I could make fanaticism and justified fear go away with bullshit magic powers. I think I learned a lot from it, and I hope you guys enjoy it.

Stay healthy

Jokeslayer94


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